Bananas!*

Not the early Woody Allen classic, but a campaigning documentary from Swedish film-maker Fredrik Gertten. A new wave of class-action lawsuits is being taken out against the Dole Food Company, which for decades used controversial chemicals on their banana plantations in Nicaragua, causing sterility among male workers. The movie is very similar to Joe Berlinger's 2009 film Crude, about similar campaigns on behalf of Ecuadorean oil workers. Like Berlinger's movie, it allows the viewer to ponder the possibility that this is a lawyers' gold rush, but the employers' complacency and defensiveness tell their own story. It seems that US corporations may be reaping a whirlwind of litigation from developing-world communities in Latin America for years to come, and like the cigarette companies, they will fight it every step of the way. What a prospect.