In the eyes of Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten, his documentary "Bananas!" is a balanced, nuanced depiction of a trial pitting Nicaraguan banana plantation workers and a prominent L.A. attorney against a powerful multinational agribusiness.
"It is a classical David-Goliath story," the director said in a phone interview last week.
In the eyes of Dole Food Co., Gertten's film is an egregiously flawed document based on what Dole lawyer Scott Edelman calls "a phony story" that has been discredited by the allegedly fraudulent conduct of the L.A. attorney, Juan J. Dominguez, at the film's center. Dole, the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables, is vowing to sue both the filmmaker and the Los Angeles Film Festival for defamation if it screens the movie this week.
In the view of the festival, which plans to host the movie's world premiere on Saturday, "Bananas!" is an intriguing object lesson that raises important questions about the conduct of U.S. companies abroad, the practices of American attorneys representing foreign workers and the ethical choices facing a documentary filmmaker who has been told after finishing his film that some of his material may be shaky, if not outright false.
The 15-year-old festival is sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and runs Thursday through June 28.
DBCP dispute
The events that "Bananas!" partially chronicles are complex and the subject of ongoing lawsuits and disputes.
They center on Dole's acknowledged past use of the pesticide dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, in Nicaragua and other countries. Banana farmers and other plantation workers have taken Dole to court, seeking millions of dollars in damages, contending that they were rendered sterile by exposure to the pesticide, which has been banned in the United States since 1979.
Thousands of plaintiffs in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast and other countries have brought cases against Dole and pesticide manufacturers. Lawyers for some Nicaraguan plaintiffs have taken their cases to U.S. courts, hoping they will enforce verdicts against Dole that have been awarded by Nicaraguan courts.
Among the attorneys representing Nicaraguan plaintiffs is Dominguez, a Cuban-born personal injury lawyer whose face appears on local bus advertisements and billboards. He appears prominently throughout "Bananas!" as his case progresses and he visits Nicaragua, providing some of the film's voice-over commentary. At one point he characterizes himself as a champion of "the little guy."
