The Stranger

In Crude: The Real Price of Oil, director Joe Berlinger flies solo into the intricate legal battle behind one of the biggest, messiest environmental lawsuits in history. On one side: the 30,000 residents of the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, who claim that three decades of criminal irresponsibility by U.S. oil giant Texaco has so polluted the air, land, and water that the residents' very existence is in peril. On the other side: Texaco, which denies all claims of wrongdoing and is ready to spend unlimited millions to make sure the case never sees a courtroom. Despite Texaco's strenuous efforts, the case finally gets its day in court, and that's when Crude springs to life: slogging through the jungle with judges and attorneys out to see the alleged evidence with their own eyes, jetting around the globe with the indigenous spokesman of the "Amazon Chernobyl," out to put a human face on this daunting wad of environmental finger-pointing and international bureaucracy. By David Schmader

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