"The Source"Directed by Martin Marecek
Set in Azerbaijan, documentary, 2005
75 mins.
(Czech with English subtitles)
This witty documentary was sadly and miserably funny at times and sobering and depressing at most others. The film looks at the broad issue of oil prices by focusing on the Baku oil industry. Baku was the home to the world's first oil rig and until today continues to be the site of huge oil wealth stemming from the Caspian.
The Source examines the irreparable ecologic damage done to the country-side by "the gift of Azerbaijan". With radiation rates 100x the average, local villagers (70% of which live in poverty) live in areas which resemble tanker spills rather than neighborhoods.
Perhaps the most eyeopening issue addressed in the film is the inability for workers to feed their families on their wages earned. While the Aliyev clan and family get rich on oil money, the people of Azerbaijan struggle to make ends meet. Rated #130th country on the corruption scale (Transparency International), Azerbaijan, by means of falsified elections has become a hybrid-dictatorship.
The newly erected BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline, among the world's longest oil pipelines, has been more of a bane than blessing for the people of Azerbaijan. The government routinely confiscated land to build on without compensating poor farmers and has contaminated a large portion of farmland. In the words of an Astafa village Azeri women, "One day we will take shovels and break that pipeline ourselves..."
The bottom line here is that NOBODY in Azerbaijan outside the Aliyev family will ever seen any benefit from Azerbaijan's rich natural resource.
No comments:
Post a Comment