Coffee & Tea Films
James
Hayes-Bohanan
, Ph.D.
Bridgewater State University Geography
Vanderbilt University Institute
for Coffee Studies UPDATED
June
2, 2013 The coffee and tea index page is the gateway to all
of my coffee and tea endeavors. This page focuses on
films that have a story to tell about coffee or tea.
Some of these are works of fiction in which coffee or
tea -- perhaps in passing or perhaps as a major
character. Others are documentaries in which film
makers have sought to tell a story about coffee,
either the bean itself or the people who care for it
and nurture it toward the cup.
I have found a growing number of audio and video
documentaries that are useful in my coffee outreach and teaching,
because they help students and other audiences to understand
the specific places in which the coffee story unfolds.
Birdsong
and Coffee makes clear the
connections between the consumption of coffee and
the health of tropical ecosystems, especially
those that support the habitat of migratory birds.
It is a beautiful film (viewable entirely online)
that brings the viewer into some of the most vital
and vibrant coffee farms in Central America. I
recommend the blog Coffee
& Conservation for those who want
to learn about this important and fascinating
subject in more detail.
The second half of the film describes student
travel in coffeelands and various alternative
coffee markets, including some organized by
students.
Black
Goldis a feature-length documentary
film that exposes the extreme disconnect between
designer lattes and the abject conditions of
farmers in Ethiopia who make them possible.It also
explores the effort to ;narrow that gap through
fair trade. It has a tendency to manipulate the
audience somewhat, by cutting quickly from the
comfortable luxury of first-world coffee to the
harsh realities of some of the most impoverished
coffeelands, with dramatic music to heighten the
contrast.
Those contrasts are real, however, so coffee
consumers do have a responsibility to know why the
ethics of coffee trade are matters of life and
death. For this reason, I show Black Gold
more than any other coffee film. I also like a
segment near the end that describes the imbalance
inherent in the operation of transnational
negotiations such as those that govern the World
Trade Organization (WTO). I sometimes show this
part of the film in non-coffee courses because it
shows just how distorted "free" markets actually
are, and how those distortions are maintained.
One Cup is a 30-minute
film that can be viewed online, about Timor-Leste (East Timor), one
of the world's newest
countries.
Few countries have suffered more than East Tmor,
in which hundreds of thousands of people have been
killed
or displaced with almost no media attention.
The History
Channel has produced a good introduction to coffee
entitled Modern
Marvels:
Coffee.
Guatemala: The Human
Price of Coffee is an excellent introduction to
the coffee crisis as it has emerged amid the
beautiful lands, rich heritage, and tragic history
of highland Central America.
THE FILM
Guatemala/Mexico:
Coffee Country is a PBS Frontline documentary
about fair trade as a partial solution to the
problems farmers face. It is part of a remarkable
series about social entrepreneurs throughout the
world who are finding ways to empower communities.
The film is a
brief but remarkably thorough overview of the
problems facing small farmers and how farmers can
work together to enter the fair-trade market. The
20-minute film can be viewed online, or as part of
the DVD set (Maxwell Library at BSC has several
copies).
The film web
site includes many extra resources, including a
simple but instructive game about the relative
earnings of coffee growers, transporters, and
processors (see link to the
game at right).
THE GAME
Coffee and Tea in Feature Films and Television
Coffee is the second-most traded commodity after oil and tea
is the second-most consumed beverage after water. Because
the two beverages are integrated into many cultures
throughout the world, it is not surprising that they
sometimes become important story elements in cinema and
television. Here, in no particular order, are some works in
which coffee, tea, coffee shops, or tea shops play some
role. By the way, I pay a lot of attention to films. I
discuss quite a few of them on A Few Good Films. The Girl in the Café
has an obvious connection to coffee, in that it begins with a chance
encounter in a café. As I
have written on my environmental geography blog,
though, it has an even deeper connection to coffee, and
the film's final act greatly resembles the final act of Black Gold, a
documentary described above. These very differnt films
portray the meetings that establish the parameters of the
world financial systems in similarly unflattering light.
M*A*S*H:
The U.S. military has done much to advance the cause of bad
coffee (read about this in Mark Pendergrast's Uncommon Grounds). When
I worked for the Wornick
Company -- one of the world's largest purveyors of
combat and humanitarian rations -- we put 100,000 packets of
nasty, instant coffee into rations every day. No series has done more to
celebrate G.I. endurance of bad coffee than M*A*S*H, a
series about army doctors set in the Korean War (1950-1952)
but really more about the Vietnam War (ca. 1960 to 1975). In
my spare time some day, I would love to create a montage of
all the allusions to terrible Army coffee. Perhaps the most
famous is from "The
Nurses" in Season Five, in which Major Houlihan
remarks, "Did you ever once ever offer me a lousy cup of
coffee?!" Over the course of 11 seasons, the coffee
references probably add up to the equivalent of at least an
episode or two. Readers who notice particularly good scenes
about coffee in M*A*S*H episode are invited to describe
mention the scene (and the season and episode) on my M*A*S*H
coffee
blog post.
Spitfire Grill: My
interest in the geography of coffee began with the farmers,
but it eventually spread to the corner coffee shop. Cafés
not only connect customers to farmers half a world away;
they can also connect members of a community to each other.
This is one of the things I ask my students to notice when
they create reviews
of coffee shops for my Secret Life of Coffee course.
In some cases, my students and I have noticed, coffee shops
have a particularly close-knit and loyal following. I cannot
think of any film that captures this dynamic better than Spitfire Grill. We had
watched this a number of years ago, and we watched it again
in March 2010 as part of Pam's Celebrating
the
States
blogging project. In fact, it was after watching this
for the Maine entry that I decided to create this film page.
The film is a classic story of redemption, in which the
protagonist must overcome the skepticism of a community in
general -- and the closedness of its main café. Watch the
film to learn why, near the end of the film, I openly wept
about a woman taking a job in a coffee shop.
Five Easy Pieces: Jack just wants
his toast! The movie has little to do with coffee,
except that its most memorable scene takes place
in a coffee shop. More than any other, this is the
scene that made Jack Nicholson the actor one loves
to hate.
Darjeeling Limited:
Because Darjeeling is one of India's three most important
tea-growing regions (along with Assam and Nigrili), I was
hoping that this film would help me to learn something about
tea cultivation in India. The film is quirky and
entertaining, but Darjeeling serves mainly as a backdrop and
foil for this movie of fraternal strife among the three sons
of an enigmatic and reclusive American woman (Angelica
Huston) who lives in a Catholic convent high in the
mountains of Darjeeling. Tea was served to the brothers in
several scenes, they sometimes added whiskey, but otherwise
seemed hardly to notice the cameo appearances of the
beverage. Flame Trees of Thika:
In the summer of 2010, I will be exploring both coffee and
tea farms (gardens) in the vicinity of Thika, just northeast
of Nairobi, Kenya. I chose to visit Kenya for some research
because it is an important producer of both coffee and tea.
I chose Thika because of my tremendous good fortune in
meeting a student who grew up on a coffee plantation there,
and whose family is willing to provide some orientation and
guidance. In preparing for the trip, I found a 1981
television miniseries whose title refers to the brilliant
flowers on a tree in the Thika area. The series is based on
a memoir of a British woman who came to Thika as a child, as
her parents sought to establish a coffee plantation there. I
have enjoyed the first four episodes -- which center on wild
animals, clearing the land, and establishing relationships
with local people and other colonials. I look forward to
receiving the second disk, whose episodes will -- I assume
-- include both the coffee and the flame trees of the title.
Out of Africa:
This is a big movie with beautiful scenery, a doomed love
affair between Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and a
dramatic coffee tragedy.
Coffee Date: A
rather hip coffee shop is the setting for this film about
homophobia. Reviews on this one are quite mixed. Some
viewers -- myself included -- see it as deeply mocking
anti-gay stereotypes; a substantial number of viewers just
see the film as perpetuating them.
