© Copyright Mitropoulos Films
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| Year |  | |
2007 |
| Genre | | |
Documentary |
| Length | | |
1:30 |
| Director | | |
Bill Haney |
| Writer | | |
Bill Haney
Peter Rhodes |
| Company | | |
Mitropoulos Films |
| Starring | | |
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| Links | | |
Official Web Site
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The movie follows a charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley, as he organizes some of this hemisphere's poorest people, challenging powerful interests profiting from their work. When he arrives in the Dominican Republic, he's warned against entering the sugar plantations where most of his parishioners live. Breaking a centuries old taboo, he discovers shocking examples of modern-day slavery intrinsic to the global sugar trade.
On an island known for tropical beauty, tourists flock to escape winter and relax with little knowledge that just a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are toiling away in unseen plantations harvesting sugarcane most of which ends up in the United States. Cutting cane by machete, they work 12 hour days, 7 days a week frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare and adequate nutrition. Often they are stateless, with neither Dominican nor Haitian identity and virtually invisible in the eyes of the law.
"The Price of Sugar" raises key questions about where the products we consume originate, at what cost they are produced and ultimately, where our responsibility lies.
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