In a rather peculiar case, the Dole Food company, the world’s largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables, is taking Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten to court over his documentary Bananas!. Dole is alleging that Gertten showed the movie at the Los Angeles Film Festival and that he’s continuing to set up screenings and trying to profit from the movie, even after it was disovered that the claims made in the documentary were based on a giant fraud.
The film is about Nicaraguan workers who say they were made sterile by the pesticide DBCP used at Dole banana plantations in the 1970s. The film even accuses Dole of causing the death of some workers, and champions attorney Juan J. Dominguez, who was seeking damages for the affected workers. The only problem is that none of it’s true. The whole thing was a gigantic extortion attempt and many of the men who were claiming to have been made sterile had never even worked for Dole and had been recruited by Dominguez and his Nicaraguan counterpart to lie as part of a false case that could have cost Dole $40 billion in damages. It’s now believed Dominguez was deliberately using Gertten as part of his fraud in order to stir up bad press for Dole and try to force a settlement.
However the Swedish documentarian is standing by his work, saying in an interview before the Los Angeles Film Festival that he knew about the courts fraud finding, but that, “This film is valid. I hope Dole will understand it is a legitimate piece of work… I believe in freedom of speech and telling the story as I saw it.”
Yeah, but there’s a difference between freedom of speech and trying to destroy a company based on evidence that is known to be false. Even the LA Film Festival was a bit more careful, issuing a disclaimer when the film was shown about how it wasn’t a fair and accurate account, but showed how things could change after a documentary was made.
Anyway, wouldn’t it be more interesting to re-edit the movie to tell the story of what really happened and how such a gargantuan international extortion attempt could take place, and how so many people, including Gertten were taken in by it?