Documentarians Take On Power and Corruption: An Interview with the Sundance Institute's Cara Mertes

Democracy Now! just returned from Park City, Utah, where we covered the Sundance Film Festival’s documentary track for the third year in a row. While there we spoke with Cara Mertes, who oversees the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and Fund. In this interview, she describes how Sundance pairs selected filmmakers with advisory editors to "step back from the day to day and look again at how they’re telling the story." One of those documentaries, Bananas, drew the ire of Dole Food Company for telling the story of how its plantation workers in Niceragua successfully sued the company for its continued use of a pesticide that can cause sterility and possibly cancer. This year, the follow-up film, "Big Boys Gone Bananas," also directed by Fredrik Gerten, premiered at Sundance and exposed the corporate scare tactics Dole used to stop the documentary from being shown. Mertes notes that "documentarians are taking on these questions of power and corruption increasingly as journalists can’t."