Microcinema DVDs - From the Ground Up by Su Friedrich

2009-07-01 purecoffee.blogspot.com
By Bill Gusky

Recently had the chance to check out the documentary From the Ground Up, a coffee documentary that does exactly what the title says; takes the viewer on a journey from cherry to peddled beverage.

As coffee documentaries go, it was decent. It had great footage of coffee picking, the wet process, drying, sorting, bagging, exporting and importing. If you've never seen it done, I imagine it would be somewhat confusing as much of the film had no narration and thus, one unfamiliar with what was going down could get lost. But even if you didn't know the lingo, the film made it all pretty easy to follow. Also, the film really makes one aware of the hard work the farmers go through for so little and thus indirectly pushes better conditions (the film is also directly dedicated for more than fair trade).

The only stabbing annoyance in the film stemmed from the soundtrack, which consisted of a singular old-timey song called the Java Jive (here it is performed by the Manhattan Transfer) played in spurts throughout the whole film. If you're one easily annoyed by such a song beaten to death, I would recommend putting the film on mute unless you see someone talking.

Overall, grab From the Ground Up if you're curious to how coffee gets to your local purveyor or you really wish to raise your awareness on what people go through so you can enjoy your morning cup.

2008-07-08 Curled Up With a Good DVD
By Trent Daniel

From the Ground Up by Su Friedrich has a simple but fascinating premise: it follows a coffee bean on its long travels from the plant to the cup of a customer. As the camera observes the chain of events, one truth is inescapable: we truly live in a global economy, and most of even our most basic products, even a simple cup of coffee, must pass through hundreds of hands and various countries in order to get to us.

The film opens in Guatemala as hundreds of workers enter a field of coffee plants. They emerge with countless bags (often up to 100 pounds full) of the prized beans; workers are paid by the amount they pick. In what is perhaps the most political aspect of the film, the camera reveals that many of the pickers are children. Also, most of the pickers live in a makeshift village on a coffee plantation. However, the focus of the film is more on observing the truth rather than passing judgment. It has minimal dialogue and, refreshingly, minimal politics, leaving the viewer free to make up his or her mind on what is shown.

The film follows the beans as they are washed, dried, raked, sorted by quality, trucked, tasted, traded on the open market, and shipped to the U.S. From there, the film moves to Charleston, SC, where the bean is blended, roasted, packaged and sent to New York City. Finally, the film shows a push-cart vendor in the pre-dawn picking up his delivery, moving his cart in place (near, humorously, a Starbucks), brewing the beans, and finally, serving his first customer of the morning.

From the Ground Up is far from perfect. The Guatemalan section that shows the actual picking and initial preparation of the bean was, for me, by far the most interesting aspect of the film. The second half, which primarily focuses on the trading, shipping and purchasing of the coffee, is less involving (though necessary in order to show the complete journey). However, my primary complaint is the use of a rather monotonous and irritating ditty known as “Java Jive” as the score. Not only is the song the only score used, but the score often just repeats a word or phrase, like a skipping record, in order to accompany a particular scene. On the filmmaker’s website, she says she used this repetition “to mimic the relentless and monotonous nature of most coffee production work.” These annoying repetitions instead often draw attention to themselves and away from what is on screen, when the images are usually strong enough to stand on their own.

Still, From the Ground Up is, for the most part, fascinating and insightful. It truly would be beneficial to show in a high school sociology and/or economics class. It also made this reviewer (who loves coffee, by the way) appreciate how much time and effort went into my next cup of coffee.

2008-06-10 Nassau Weekly
By Martina Car

Few people question the work that goes into their daily cup of coffee. Few are even aware that coffee is the second most traded international commodity after oil, with 12 billion pounds consumed annually. Perhaps, one may find the fifty-cent cup of Americano bought from a street vendor in Manhattan entirely unremarkable. The Starbucks phenomenon has become, for the majority, completely banal; after all, isn’t it just another business like McDonalds that managed to sell its products successfully on the global market? With the difference that Starbucks coffee, unlike fast food, is in no way cheap. So why do so many people buy it? Why can Starbucks sell a two-dollar “Grande” cup of Joe when the beans from the same plantation go into a cup sold for fifty cents? How does the coffee economy operate? How is a bean picked, processed, traded, roasted, and retailed?
Dissatisfied with her inability to answer these questions, Su Friedrich goes in search of answers in her documentary film From the Ground Up. She has cropped and manipulated over 40 hours of footage into a 54-minute explanation of the coffee-making process. The length of the feature is matched to intermittent blurbs of the song “Java Jive” which are sometimes neurotically repeated to strengthen the understanding and the feeling for how coffee is made.
Friedrich, renowned filmmaker and film professor at the University, has been making movies since 1978. She is the recipient of numerous awards, and her work has been commemorated in retrospectives at the Museum Of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. A proponent of the American feminist movement, Friedrich has imbued her films about personal experiences with an underlying social or political message. Questions of sexual norms and homosexuality have also been a common subject of her work. She has never made a purely documentary film in her career before and she does not know what to think of this first attempt. Her humble, questioning ambivalence is understandable coming from a filmmaker trained in a different genre. Nevertheless, the film is successful in its candid representation of the coffee industry from the ground up.
The film opens in a plantation in Guatemala, where workers of all ages pick glossy copper berries from vast stretches of densely packed shrubs. At the end of a hard day’s work, the coffee pickers, drenched in sweat, lug their plump 100-pound canvas bags to a clearing and drop them with a sigh of relief. Their income ranges from two to three dollars a day. A recent study shows that over half of the coffee pickers in Guatemala don’t even earn the minimum wage imposed by national law. During the film, there is hardly any time to contemplate these injustices, as the viewer is compelled to move on, like the shots onscreen, at a rather fast pace. So I sadly watch the workers heave the heavy fruits of their labor up a steep ladder to release them at last onto the deep bed of a pickup truck.
The sacks are then transported to the factory where their contents are subjected to a serious makeover. The berries are burst to release the resplendent pale yellowish grey of fresh, pre-roasted beans. The beans are separated from their shells then passed through an assembly line of women trained to skillfully extract damaged seeds. The lyrics “I love coffee, I love tea” repeat insistently, evoking a suppressed feeling of frustration about to burst. “Some of these women faint on their first day of work,” Friedrich notes. Indeed, picking spoiled coffee seeds from a rapid conveyer belt for extended time intervals is worthy of confusion, as well as mental and physical exhaustion.
Friedrich engrosses us in her absorbing vision of the intricacies and hard work behind the coffee-making process. As a viewer, feeling sympathetic toward the workers at the bottom side of the coffee chain is inevitable, as is the questioning that goes with it. Where do we as consumers stand in this cycle of production and trade?
Although the film doesn’t explicitly encourage the audience to take any sort of action, it does support the movement toward fair trade by elucidating the exploitation that drives the coffee industry. Those who profit the most from the business are, surprisingly, the roasters and tasters, who ultimately determine the flavor of the coffee. On the other hand, laborers in developing countries are paid less than the amount needed to afford their basic living requirements. Because fair trade coffee makes up only about two percent of total coffee produced worldwide, it is important that we as consumers buy fair trade certified coffee in order to boost demand. Fair trade farms not only provide workers with a just wage to allow them the possibility of economic development and wellbeing, but also ensure safe working conditions and promote sustainable agriculture. The results benefit both human beings and the environment.
Friedrich manages to suggest a message, to incite curiosity, and motivate a strong response through the visual, rhythmic quality of the film. She does not flood the viewer with facts, statistics, or economic analyses of the coffee industry before jumping into her documentary. We are only asked to watch and understand. The idea is simply one of exploration, observation, and personal evaluation.
Once the coffee travels back to the United States, we follow its path as it gets roasted, tasted, and eventually sold. Retailers usually buy coffee from roasters, but nowadays an increasing number of coffee shops roast the coffee themselves. In the documentary, coffee tasting is portrayed as an almost spiritual experience that captivates the senses. Like wine tasters, coffee tasters are experts in their field. As they congregate around a table topped by a collection of different roasts, the tasters each pick a cup of the same type of coffee, and bring it close to their lips slowly, musingly. They take a tentative whiff of the concoction and allow the dark liquid to rotate as they delicately rock the cup back and forth. They then move in for the kill, gingerly, to avoid getting burned by the steaming brew, and keep it in their mouth, tasting it with patience. Finally comes the verdict and the coffee is either sold or modified.
The final scenes of From the Ground Up take place in Manhattan, where Friedrich approaches pushcart vendors in search of a conclusion to the coffee’s odyssey. As an interesting side note, Friedrich filmed these scenes in the beginning of her adventure. She meets with an African food vendor, who rants openly about his boss. Those who put in the most work always get the least benefits, he complains, but such is life. He laughs it off while he scrubs every inch of his metal pushcart with a foamy sponge. In our minds, we are brought back to the workers in Guatemala, and we can’t help but feel sorry for them. The pushcart vendors, despite their undesirable working conditions, are paid much more than three dollars a day.
And where does Starbucks fit in the situation? As the largest specialty coffee company in the world, it would seem natural for Starbucks to offer Fair Trade coffee to its consumers. Yet it took a long process of protests and petitions to achieve results; Starbucks now sells Fair Trade coffee only in whole bean form. Its pricing policies only ensure workers about $.80 cents per pound of picked coffee beans, as opposed to the .26/lb guaranteed as a minimum to conventional Fair Trade workers, and .41/lb to organic Fair Trade pickers. So buying coffee from Starbucks does make a large impact, considering that the company owns a fifth of all cafes nationwide and many more around the globe. Buying Starbucks coffee that is not certified as Fair Trade only encourages the persistence of corrupt standards and dangerously low wages for coffee plantations workers in the developing world.
From The Ground Up closes with an arrangement of beautiful shots through the streets of New York City as “Java Jive” approaches its conclusion. People stride in and out, oblivious to their surroundings, clutching clutch a cup of steaming coffee.

2008-06-03 DVD Talk
By Chris Neilson

A viewer of From the Ground Up might be surprised to learn that this documentary following coffee from plant to cup was made by experimental American filmmaker Su Friedrich who is best known for her avant-garde films about sexual identity and politics. As director, cinematographer, and image and sound editor, Friedrich displays a nuanced approach to her subject. Where a careless viewer might come away thinking From the Ground Up is viewpoint-free observational documentary, a careful viewer will be rewarded by the subtlety of Friedrich's style: only the slightest of pauses on the face of a child agricultural laborer or on a coffee plantation owner's exquisite hand-tooled leather saddle, or the marriage of images of crude shanties with the airiest of jingles, hint that Friedrich is appalled with what she's seeing and thinks we should be too.

From the Ground Up begins on a hillside on a Guatemalan coffee plantation. Men, women, and children work side by side picking coffee beans and filling large sacks from early morning to early evening. Children as young as six, not officially on the payroll, help their parents fulfill their 100 pound daily quota for which the picker receives a day.

Back from the fields, the foreman shows Friedrich how the coffee is processed to separate the bean from the pulp. She then follows the coffee from plantation to warehouse where the coffee is assessed for quality and then sold into the international market. But, before picking up the story upon its entry into an American port, Friedrich stops off at an urban Guatemalan grocery store where her camera scans coffee section. Ironically, the Guatemalan grocer's coffee selection appears identical to that of a mid-market American grocer's, Folgers Instant and Ground predominate, followed by Nestlé, Maxwell House, Sanka and a host of other brands likely all exported from Guatemala, roasted and packed elsewhere, and then imported back into Guatemala for sale.

Once stateside, Friedrich catches up with the coffee at the offices of Balzac Bros., a white-shoe, third-generation coffee importing firm in Charleston, South Carolina. The firm's owners and sales staff are urbane businessmen steeped in the jargon of their trade. Friedrich's camera records a tasting provided to a couple of new clients, young owners of a coffee house and micro-roaster, who settle on a stock and take delivery all the same day.

Friedrich heads next to her home town, New York City, to a large commercial roaster, Vassilaros & Sons, that supplies the city's ubiquitous push carts. From roaster, to push cart, to Manhattan office worker Friedrich follows the coffee completing the grower to consumer cycle for coffee.

Though only 54 minutes, From the Ground Up never feels rushed, but nor does the journey from hillside to cup feel overly long. Friedrich allows the story to unfold at a conversational pace, but relies on music to caffeinate her work. The song used throughout this work is an especially catchy ditty from 1940 entitled Java Jive that's still rolling around in my head. Here's a bit of it:

I love coffee, I love tea
I love the java jive and it loves me
Coffee and tea and the jivin' and me
A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

I love java, sweet and hot
Whoops! Mr. Moto, I'm a coffee pot
Shoot me the pot and I'll pour me a shot
A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

Oh, slip me a slug from the wonderful mug
And I cut a rug till I'm snug in a jug
A slice of onion and a raw one, draw one.
Waiter, waiter, percolator!

The Video:
From the Ground Up was filmed on DV, and is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The image quality is good with warm but steady coloration for the material filmed in Guatemala and South Carolina and cooler coloration for the material filmed in New York.

The Audio:
Friedrich's use of the camera mic to record sound allows for fluid, low budget filmmaking, but also leaves the audio sounding hollow or distant at times, though always understandable. On the other hand, Java Jive sounds alive and vital playing across the front channels.

There are optional Spanish subtitles, but the English subtitles are forced and only play as translation of Spanish dialogue.

The Extras:
The only extra is a pdf booklet accessible by computer DVD-ROM drive. The booklet includes a data-supported call to action to buy Fair Trade Certified coffee.

Final Thoughts:
Coffee is the second most valuable global commodity after oil. The industry employees 25 million farmers and workers. Americans consume 3.15 billion pounds of coffee a year, yet many of us have only a vague understanding of how coffee gets from the exotic locale identified on the label to us First-World consumers. From the Ground Up is a valuable corrective to fill that information gap.

0000-00-00 BellaOnline
By Gayle E. Santana

Film and Funding on Behalf of the Coffee Workers

We all enjoy a great cup of coffee, and much like our food, we rarely give thought as to how it arrived. I had the pleasure of meeting two women at the Coffee and Tea Festival in New York City who not only can tell you first-hand in great detail as to how it arrived, they are also taking that information and doing something with it to help make the lives of the people who sacrifice to bring it to you just a bit better.

Su Friedrich-From The Ground Up

Su Friedrich is an award-winning filmmaker, having produced and directed 18 films to date. Ms. Friedrich has used her gift as a film-maker of merit to bring us From The Ground Up, a beautifully done film that shows the startling differences along the way in the journey of coffee from the ground to your cup.

Beginning in Southwestern Guatemala, Su Friedrich gives an observers point of view of the rudimentary beginnings of your cup of coffee. The film opens with the coffee workers, which includes men, women (often carrying their babies), and children riding in crowded trucks out to the hilly coffee fields in the wee hours for a full day of picking.

At the end of the day, carrying bags that can reach a weight of 110 lbs. on their backs, they go to an area where the sacks are measured. Not yet free of their burdens, it is their responsibility to climb up into the trucks on awkward steps and empty those bags--only to receive a day for their efforts.

Ms. Friedrich does not try to lead you with heavy commentary. She just lets you observe and draw your own conclusions. With the striking contrast between the workers’ labor-intensive days and their housing and living conditions on the farm against the farm owner’s stables with specially-made initialed saddles, it won’t take you long. Moving forward in the journey to the people who call the shots, setting the price of the most coveted beans, the cupping sessions of the buyers, the differences are surely striking.

Ms. Friedrich does not stop with the coffee growers. She also highlights the hard work of the coffee vendors that you often see on the streets of New York City, selling coffee for under a dollar, a far cry from the average coffees in the coffee chains but not quite so fancy either.

The booklet that comes with the DVD, “Notes From the Ground Up”, provides a wealth of sobering information and statistics, including some eye-opening information about discrepancies in the actual figures paid to Starbucks’ Fair Trade workers as opposed to the figure quoted to the public.

Karen Gordon-Cup for Education

Karen Gordon is the founder of Cup for Education, an organization whose focus is on assisting the rural communities of Central and Latin America dependent on coffee farming with obtaining the basic tools needed for education like books, furniture, etc. One of Cup for Education’s most recent accomplishments was Beans for Books where funds were donated to purchase library and text books for communities devastated by Hurricane Stan.

Ms. Gordon is the director of CHC (Coffee Holding Company) and has also been involved with Women in Coffee. Curious about how this all began, I asked Ms. Gordon a few questions.

You have traveled to Nicaragua and are involved with numerous efforts all around coffee. What led you to become so heavily involved with coffee as a vehicle for change?

“I was on a trip back in 2003 where myself and a group of women in the coffee industry had the opportunity to spend several days with the women and children of a cooperative in Nicaragua. They shared their lives and experiences with us. The daily problems they encounter in all aspects of life. I saw the conditions of the school in the community and realized there was much we take for granted.

We all are making a living in coffee, our children get to go to school with all the materials they need, they have teachers, and their school has a roof and desks. These children had none of this. Education is the cornerstone to improving one's life. I felt this was something I could help with."

I asked both Ms. Gordon and Ms. Friedrich how can the average coffee drinker continue to enjoy their coffee and yet help to better the lives of the growers?

Ms. Friedrich:

"I think people should just make an effort to buy Fair Trade coffee. It isn't always easy to find but, when it's there, it's obvious because it always has the Fair Trade logo on it. And there are two aspects to this: getting coffee that's made and buying it at a store.

For people who have a local coffee bar they frequent, I would recommend that they ask the owner, if they don't offer FT coffee, to start offering it. If need be, they might charge a bit more (as some places in my neighborhood do) so that the customers have a choice, and because the owners might complain about paying more for it but not being able to charge more.

Secondly, if they have a local store where they buy coffee, it's the same thing--ask them to start carrying some Fair Trade coffee. Or if they go to two stores, and one already carries some, then they should make a point of buying from the store that does, and letting the other store know about that. But then again we can't always do this--we constantly buy coffee on the go, so I don't think people should stress out and feel guilty all the time. We have to yield to the pressures of life when we have no option, but when we do have an option (like what we buy for use at home) then we can make that little extra effort to buy Fair Trade coffee."

Ms. Gordon:

"I think just taking the time to think about where the coffee comes from and who is growing it. I know there are a lot of causes out there we can support, but sometimes remembering the people that contribute to something so present in our everyday life no matter how small can be a nice gesture. It really does not take a lot to make a difference in these communities."

I asked myself a question that others may ask; Should we stop drinking coffee? I don’t see that as the answer. These countries are dependent upon coffee for their very survival. But we definitely need to do more like letting our dollars speak for us by buying fair trade coffees whenever we can or supporting organizations like Cup for Education and educating ourselves with films like From The Ground Up.

We should also let the companies that produce our cup of choice know that we are more than concerned; that we want to know what they are doing to improve the imbalance and that we want more. Hold them, as well as ourselves, accountable.

It was best summed up by one gentleman hard at work scrubbing the vendor carts who says, “This is life. The most people who work hard, are the most people who get less money.” This may be true, but in my opinion, the huge difference between what the workers in places like Guatemala, Nicaragua and Ethiopia are paid and the ultimate profits at the end of the chain leave room for a fairer wage for the workers.

Is buying Fair Trade coffee enough? Ms. Friedrich’s final frame on the DVD says it all. “Dedicated to the movement for even more than Fair Trade.”

Su Friedrich-From the Ground Up
http://www.microcinemadvd.com/product/DVD/783/From_the_Ground_Up_by_Su_Friedrich.html

2008-01-22 Biorama
By Magdalena Miedl

Hands, over and over again. The fast hands of women, children’s hands, calloused workers’ hands, the groomed hands of gentlemen, the manicured hands of ladies: coffee junkies have no idea how many hands the beans pass through, and how much manual labor goes into that one cup which is supposed to wake you up and bring you pleasure, or which you carelessly spill.
The American filmmaker Su Friedrich follows the path of this ubiquitous stimulant all the way from the mountain slopes of Guatemala to the cup. Friedrich seems to allow her camera to simply observe, even while she juxtaposes the under-age coffee pickers and their hundred-pound baskets with the plantation owner’s thoroughbred horse, or counterpoising the many bare-footed little children with the large mansion. But her mostly unimpeded view lets the spectator think independently. No voice-over explains the context: only here and there does a subtitle give a little information about the locations and their inhabitants: the images reveal themselves, in all their roughness and mobile jerkiness. The cheerful “Java Jive” - a pretty, naïve a cappella song about the merits of coffee – accompanies the entire film in constant repetitions, reflecting the monotony of assembly-line work. Again and again, “I love coffee, I love tea….”
Worm-eaten beans are sorted out manually “by the ladies” – Su Friedrich lets all processes be explained to her in detail by knowledgeable, elegantly dressed, mostly young men (and a few older ones). Warehouses filled with coffee, overwhelming by their sheer mass.
Again and again the hum of the assembly lines blends into the impertinently cheerful, “I love coffee, I love…” until the peppy thoughtlessness is barely endurable.
In her work, the renowned filmmaker Friedrich turns a critical eye on marginalized populations or scenarios of oppression. Combining narrative with documentary elements, many of her films deal with women, homosexuality, and the role of family in society. Reaching beyond those themes, “From the Ground Up” is an implicitly political and at the same time condensed work.
Most of the time Su Friedrich is behind the camera herself. And if she shows up in the picture, the camera may casually sit on the table while the director asks questions: about the sequence of production, about work hours, and also about the varying degrees of quality. The film doesn’t aim for obvious social critique even if it is present in many frames. One interview subject quotes a study by Oxfam which states that eight percent of the world’s population is directly or indirectly involved in coffee production – including the waiters and coffee-cart owners who supply their customers in New York City and all over the world with caffeine every morning. The film ends with one of those coffee stands on wheels, as the coffee finally arrives at the customer, and the paper cup rescues the morning in the metropolis. A whiff of nostalgia arises – don’t we all love it, hot and strong and stimulating?
Only in the credits does the sentence appear: “Dedicated to even more than Fair Trade,” because our beloved coffee arrives in the cup at a high cost for the human beings producing it for us. A New York coffee hound has the last word, saying to the man in the cart: “Your coffee is wonderful. It’s addictive!” Coffee is held in high esteem.