The Real Price Of Oil

Sandy Cioffi’s Sweet Crude
by Scott Driscoll

Heavily overcast skies filled with acid rain that corrodes metal. Women and children paddling in boats across gray-brown water in which once abundant fish are mostly gone and those left are poisoned. In the brown murk, where sky blends with horizon, gas flares burn atop oil-well vent pipes. Welcome to Africa’s Niger Delta.

In December 2006, Seattle filmmaker Sandy Cioffi was in the delta at the village of Oporoza, filming a feature-length documentary, Sweet Crude, when she was contacted by ABC News to arrange an interview for a “Nightline” story. They wanted a statement from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a group that had formed a year earlier, in November 2005, to protest the substandard living conditions visited upon the area by 50 years of oil extraction.

“I was thrilled at the request,” says Cioffi. This interview, she felt certain, would finally bring much needed international attention to MEND’s cause in a country where 80% of the economy, according to Cioffi, derives from oil production, primarily by Shell, Chevron, and Exxon.

Despite the risk, the government having shown a pattern of responding to non-violent protests with force, on December 20, 2006, Paul, a shy but well-spoken rebel in his early twenties, agreed to be the “unmasked face” of MEND. He was patched through by phone from Oporoza to ABC’s Brian Ross. Both ends of the conversation were caught on film and the footage included in Sweet Crude.

Ross opens by asking who their “beef” is with, but his countenance takes on the laser focus of a bird of prey preparing to dive at its target when he repeatedly encourages Paul to admit that MEND is a “terrorist” group. Paul prefers to call his fellow rebels “freedom fighters.” But as soon as he admits that MEND began taking hostages among oil workers in February 2006 during negotiations to use as human shields, Ross draws a finger across his throat, a signal to his crew to stop recording. Ross fails to tempt Paul to say the word “terrorist,” but “hostages” is apparently close enough.

Cioffi’s film does not flinch from spelling out the cost of oil production to the 20-30 million people crammed together amid the rivers and mangrove swamps in an area roughly twice the size of Maryland. According to her research, one in five children in the Niger Delta die before the age of five from pollution related causes such as asthma or skin disease. “A new steel railing was put on a building in November 2005 when I first came to Oporoza. When I returned in July 2006, seven months later, the acid rain from the gas flares had left rain-shaped divots in the metal.” The average life expectancy has lowered from 65 years of age in the late 1950s, when oil exploration began in the delta, to 40 years of age by April 2008 when Cioffi stopped filming. “Seeing things like this really changes you.”

The Nightline report was eventually “left on the cutting room floor,” but the tenor of the interview sent a clear message. “The outside world views MEND as gangsters,” says Cioffi, interesting only to the degree that they threaten the “cheap supply of oil.”

“After that,” says Cioffi, “the locals seemed to reach a tipping point.”

“If I die today just sitting here,” says a young man in Oporoza interviewed by Cioffi for the film in the months preceding the ABC interview, “I just die. But if I die today trying to change my life, I think that is the best way to do.” After the ABC interview, the grandmothers and mothers no longer felt compelled to prevent their young men from joining the rebel training camps in the mangroves.

Cioffi’s filming activity did not escape the notice of the government, and on April 12, 2008, Joint Task Force (JTF) soldiers arrested Cioffi and her crew to put a stop to it. “I was in a boat outside Sapele in the Niger Delta with my Seattle crew, Sean Porter, Cliff Worsham, and Tammi Sims, and a local, Joel Bisina, a peace mediator, when we were stopped at a JTF checkpoint. I had a legal visa and this was my fourth time in the country, so I never thought we’d be arrested.”

They were pulled out of the boat, their cameras and recordings confiscated, and they were driven without food or water eight hours north to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, where they were processed into the military prison at the Headquarters of the State Security Services (SSS).

“It’s the creepiest feeling I’ve ever had,” admits Cioffi. “The slow descent into becoming something more serious” began. A six-hour grilling in 110 degree heat followed. “They kept asking crazy stuff, like did I have a Swiss Bank account. They assumed we were rich.” Letters were sent to the Nigerian President Y’ar Adua by fourteen U.S. lawmakers contacted by Cioffi’s human rights attorney, who’d been retained for such a contingency. After six days of incarceration, the five were released. The SSS warned Cioffi and her Seattle crew that if they ever came back to Nigeria they would be arrested immediately.

“Their intention was to scare us so we’d go home and tell other journalists not to go there.” It worked.

What hadn’t been confiscated were 140 hours of previously recorded footage, which Cioffi edited down to a 93-minute film that opens a view onto “one of the most polluted places on earth.” If her film hits its target, the outside world will finally start asking the question she asks in the film: why is this outrage allowed to continue?

At age 47, Cioffi, a professor at Seattle Central Community College in the Film and Video Communications Department is not new to filming. Along with documentary news clips such as Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride filmed in 2003, Cioffi’s credits include narrative features, such as Terminal 187, a half-hour special for PBS. Sweet Crude, Cioffi’s first feature-length documentary, is beginning to earn for her much deserved critical attention.

Three screenings in June 2009 at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) won for Cioffi the Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision. The film was also runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Best Documentary Award. The International Documentary Association’s 2009 DocuWeeks showcase, a program created to provide week-long theatrical runs in Los Angeles and New York for groundbreaking documentary films, selected Sweet Crude as one of only 18 features for the program. Showing in DocuWeeks is considered in the film world a prerequisite to qualifying for an Oscar nomination.

“I collaborated on the specific look we wanted with my director of photography [DP], Sean Porter,” says Cioffi. “We wanted to show the landscape as a dead character in many shades of gray, offset against the color of the people. We did a lot of shots of feet to accentuate the feeling of strength coming up from the ground.” Cioffi used two handheld Panasonic DVX100 cameras (“post-production, the final film is ‘rezzed’ up to high density”) so that one camera could still be in play if the other broke down. Repairs or buying spare parts were simply not options. Re-charging batteries was also not an option. Most places in the Delta have no electricity, “a sad irony not lost on the crew,” considering that the region feeds billions of dollars of crude oil to the world’s hungriest consumers of oil for power.

Why Cioffi decided to set aside the risk factor and begin shooting this film is still not entirely clear even to her. In November 2005, Cioffi was hired by an unnamed NGO to film the building of the Niger Delta Friendship Library, ostensibly a peace gesture between warring factions and Chevron.

“While filming the library,” says Cioffi, “a couple of mothers in Oporoza urgently grabbed my arm. They looked at me and my camera like we were a canister of oxygen.” The outside world, she decided, needed to know what was happening there. “Those people were literally dying in order to get media attention.”

The Nigerian government’s hanging in 1993 of Ken Saro Wiwa, the Ogoni environmental leader, is presented in the film as the event that galvanized resistance. Ensuing incidents led to the government wiping out as many as 20 entire communities.

By Cioffi’s count, 50,000 civilians in the Niger Delta were killed by government troops between 1999 and spring 2008. In a film voice-over, Cioffi grimly observes: “Today [April 2008] the Niger Delta feels like an occupied land. The JTF branch of the military is… a constant presence on waterways. They force villagers to pay bribes to pass safely and routinely abuse [“abuse” is the word used in the film; Cioffi confides that what they really do is “rape”] women.”

With the February 2007 national elections, Cioffi’s interviewees began briefly singing notes of optimism. “The election was completely corrupt,” says Cioffi, “but the vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, was from the Niger Delta.” The election encouraged the rebels to return hostages unharmed and come back to the talks.

When Cioffi returned to Oporoza in April 2008, she says, “I intended to film real change.” What she came back with is a memorable scene that shows 40 clean-cut teen boys who look like they should be asking dates to a prom. After daring to demand access to discussions they hoped to be part of, the boys are lined up side by side belly down on a dock. What we don’t see, but what we’re told follows, is that the JTF soldiers flogged them, and then, using their own version of “water-boarding,” pushed their heads into the water and held them until they nearly drowned.

In the summer of 2008, the militant faction of MEND openly declared an “oil war” in Nigeria. By June 2009, says Cioffi, “Chevron in the Niger Delta has been completely shut down by the rebels. Shell’s production is down 40%.” The reaction from the Nigerian government-supported military has been predictably violent.

On May 15, 2009, according to the film’s epilogue, JTF attacked Oporoza and killed “hundreds” of villagers while the film’s Web site reports that as a result of this attack against civilians, “as many as 20,000 are now refugees, cut off from food, water, and medical aid.”

“But what if they were to win?” asks Cioffi. “The rebels want representative democracy. They also want 25% of oil revenues to go to building local infrastructure. They need roads, schools, hospitals, electricity. But none of this will make any difference unless the multinational corporations extracting oil in the area would be held to higher standards and threatened with consequences if they didn’t clean up their mess.”

The Niger Delta has a checkered history. It sits at the mouth of a river that, claims Cioffi, “is Africa’s superhighway,” and for 250 years was the main shipping point for the African slave trade, and because of that became a repository of displaced people from many different ethnic groups packed together into a country called Nigeria in the 1960s after the British left. For the first time, perhaps, the people of the Niger Delta are willing to work together to fight back against the “benign neglect” with which they’ve been looked upon by a world that wants its oil and wants it cheap. The launching of Sweet Crude might be the warning arrow that pierces the armor of that world’s neglect.

To get the message out, Cioffi’s film has received generous financial assistance beyond its support from The Northwest Film Forum. In 2005, Jody Hall, owner of Seattle’s Café Verite/Cupcake Royale, pumped in enough dollars to get the film rolling. In 2006, another Seattle-ite, Menno VanWyk, who started a film company, “Virasana Productions,” raised support for Sweet Crude to continue. Elizabeth Rudolf of Seattle kicked in money in 2009 to help offset the cost of attending film festivals. Five distributors are showing an interest in the film. “It’s a matter of selecting the distributor best positioned to advance the film’s message,” says Cioffi.

“Honestly, I was taken with Sandy and the story, the potential ramification of getting the story told,” says VanWyk, the film’s leading investor. “The fact that she wanted to do the film to effect a positive outcome frankly impressed the hell out of me. It was something that needed to be done.”

It’s a deserving film that will make you uneasy. It could be argued that the film is biased and fails to pursue key angles: the government’s willingness to permit oil drilling without mediation of damage to the area; the plight of the hostages taken from the oil rigs by the rebels; the responsibility of a government that receives, according to Cioffi, a 60% tax on oil profits but spends very little of that revenue to help its own people.

Cioffi admits that, in the filming, she lost her journalistic objectivity, even came to question its validity. But was she prepared to be the ambassador for the delta’s cause?

“When the stakes got high,” says Cioffi, “I asked myself, was this something I meant to do, put myself in this much danger? Sitting in a military prison, you realize the real price of oil.”

Scott Driscoll is a Seattle-based freelance writer and teacher.

Contact: Sandy Cioffi, 206-612-0684 or fastfwd@speakeasy.net
Menno VanWyk 206-236-3229