History, Sociopolitical Documentary with no narration published by Arte in 2017 - English language
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The saga of a handful of conquerors who built an empire in Central America and invented the methods of one of the very first multinationals.
In 19th century Central America, a few entrepreneurial cowboys built an empire that enslaved populations and corrupted governments for over 100 years. The United Fruit Company thrived on unregulated capitalism; this film tells its story and that of its pioneers who feared neither God nor Man.
Until the 1970s, a multinational set up a monopoly by combining violence, repression, corruption, environmental destruction and a formidable marketing machine. It turned an unknown fruit into an instrument of fortune and domination.
Today bananas are everywhere: Americans eat nearly 10 billion of them per year, consuming more pounds of bananas than apples and oranges combined. WHEN BANANA RULED tells the story of the men who made bananas the most ubiquitous fruit in the world, through a multinational empire that dominated production and sales, overthrew governments, and created a business model still largely used by today's tech giants.
The story of bananas as commodities begins with a failed railway project started in Costa Rica in 1871, led by American Minor Cooper Keith. When the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments to Keith for its construction, the businessman faced ruin. His salvation? Bananas. Keith would go on to co-found the United Fruit Company and within decades-after a concerted campaign led by the father of public relations, Edward Bernays-bananas became a staple of the North American diet. Animated mascot Miss Chiquita Banana was a pop culture icon, doctors recommended bananas as an ideal food for children, and bananas popped up in movies and Broadway musicals.
But, as WHEN BANANA RULED documents, the entire enterprise was built on a rapacious, imperialist business model that required the domination of countries including Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. United Fruit took over critical national infrastructure like railways and ports, rapidly expanded plantations by displacing small (often Indigenous) farmers, bought itself favorable legislation, and, like today's largest companies, sheltered profits offshore to avoid taxes.
Life on the plantations was a world within a world: A strict hierarchy with white managers from the best business schools, foremen from the US South (recruited for their knowledge of slavery), and black laborers paid largely in company food coupons and strictly forbidden to unionize. When a new, revolutionary government was formed in Guatemala, United Fruit's plantations were nationalized. What happened next came straight from the playbook that would dominate US foreign policy in the region: claim a Communist threat, persuade legislators back home of its dangers, bomb the country, and install a new, pro-American and pro-business regime.
Using a rich trove of archival footage and documents, including letters to and from lobbyists, telegrams, vintage ads and movie clips, and gorgeous, hand-tinted stills, WHEN BANANA RULED is a story of intrigue that touches on economics, international politics, the history of multinational business and reveals how an array of forces conquered the world through a simple fruit.
A Film by Mathilde Damoisel ; Quark and ARTE France Co-Production with CNC and Al Arabiya News Channel
Video Codec: x264 CABAC High@L4 Video Bitrate: 3 904 Kbps Video Resolution: 1920x1080 Display Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Frames Per Second: 25.000 fps Audio Codec: E-AC3 Audio Bitrate: 224 kb/s CBR 48000 Hz Audio Streams: 2 Audio Languages: english RunTime Per Part: 53 min 10 s Number Of Parts: 1 Part Size: 1.53 GB Source: WEB DL (Thanks to 'tobias') Encoded by: DocFreak08
