The Motivations Behind Brewing Up Black Gold

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Here's how it all started:

In 1984, nearly one million Ethiopians died as a result of a famine caused by a series of droughts. In 2002, famine struck again and this time it also devastated the coffee growers. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and produces some of the best coffee beans in the world. And yet, despite the ongoing boom in the coffee industry, coffee farmers were struggling to feed their families.

A mountainous Ethiopian village

With this in mind, Nick and Marc set off and filmed in a myriad of locations that stretched from Seattle to the wet, lush coffee producing regions of southern Ethiopia. Along the way, they interviewed and befriended all manner of people related to the coffee trade ranging from baristas to the charismatic, accidental-star Tadesse Meskela. A friendly, yet incredibly serious man, Tadesse is the general manager of a coffee farmer cooperative (co-op) that helps some 74,000 individual coffee farmers (and growing!) collectively bargain a fair price for their incredibly valued commodity. Aside from the coffee farms, Black Gold tours coffee roasting factories, trade shows, coffee related competitions and a WTO meeting. Each of these locals helped reveal another layer, another value added step, to the coffee industry. Two and a half years later, Black Gold was finished and premiered to much acclaim at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.