Carolina Loyola-Garcia

Untold Coffee Stories

Single-channel video, 4 min., color, stereo.

© CLG/2006

 

Untold Coffee Stories is a short video created for the invitational program of the Film Kitchen Annual Celebration of 2006. Each year, they produce a festival with a competitive and an invitational section. A theme is assigned and everybody has to work around that. During 2006 the theme was: "coffee". My first impulse was to investigate the origins of coffee, and after reading about the history of coffee the one aspect that kept coming to mind was the social and political circumstances of coffee production during the past century. One particular event triggered the creation of this video: the 1932 Massacre in El Salvador, where 30,000 peasants were killed in a single week when revolting against low wages and unfair working conditions.

 

“Short whispering of social conscience through the history of coffee labor.” - Bill O’Driscoll, Pittsburgh CIty Paper.