The Los Angeles Film Festival and a movie production company should head off wasteful litigation by moving their discredited movie "Bananas!*" from the "documentary" category to a clearly fictional class in this weekend's festival, CJAC President John H. Sullivan urged Thursday.
A CJAC news release explains that the film purports to document the work of Los Angeles personal injury lawyer Juan J. Dominguez, who led a lawsuit in Los Angeles on behalf of hundreds of Nicaraguan banana plantation workers claiming they were rendered sterile by chemicals Dole Food Company, Inc. used on the crops.
But as the film was being wrapped, Dominguez's heroic story was being unwrapped in the Los Angeles County courtroom of Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney. Dismissing the case after a long trial, she said that "... if you took all the bad cases I've read and put them together, they don't even come close to what's happened here. ... The actions of the attorneys in Nicaragua and of some of the attorneys in the United States, specifically the Law Offices of Juan Dominguez, have perverted this court's ability to deliver justice to those parties that come before it."
The film has been moved out of competition, according to a release from Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten, and will now screen in a special "case study" screening slot that will center on "what happens when a film is finished and new developments come to light."
The L.A. Film Festival, however, still lists the movie as a documentary.
Sullivan said in the news release, "It's understandable that Gertten as a movie maker is pained by the unexpected publicity his movie is receiving. But as 'one of Sweden's preeminent documentarians and investigative journalists' he should be interested in a sequel that does qualify as a documentary."
Click here to read an earlier post about the case.