SACRAMENTO — California’s statewide legal reform group is urging the Los Angeles Film Festival and a movie production company to head off wasteful litigation by moving their discredited movie “Bananas!*” from the “documentary” category to a clearly fictional class in this weekend’s festival.
The movie 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.”
Judge Chaney’s follow-up ruling this week explained how the lawyers used scripts and videos of plantation work to coach plaintiffs how to provide evidence, and paid Central American labs to fabricate reports of chemical-caused sterility on farms overseen by California-based Dole Food Co.
Early in May, Dole’s attorney at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher warned that the screening would present “false and defamatory statements of purported fact” and subject Swedish film maker Fredrik Gertten and promoters to legal action. The producer’s law firm Lee and Lawless fired back that the show would go on (but that “potentially misleading statements” have been edited or removed from the publicity web site and that “steps are being taken to ensure that events depicted in the film are put in appropriate context for viewers.”)
As the premier date neared, Gertten displayed the controversy across the film’s promotional web site, but has begun to cautiously backpedal on the film’s credibility. In a long news release issued today Gertten had this to say about “one of the film’s lead characters”:
“The accusations against Juan Dominguez are serious and I understand that. I look forward to following this case as it develops.”
The movie has been moved out of competition, according to Gertten’s release and “now will 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.
John H. Sullivan, president of the Civil Justice Association of California, which is urging that the film be re-categorized, said, “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.”
Sullivan noted that the movie’s financial backers include Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.
“As one whose career is anchored by the movie classic ‘The Sting,’ Redford is famously known for pulling off a fictional one himself. And as one of many indirect victims of the Juan Dominguez sting, Redford may be especially interested in funding a redeeming follow-up that sets the record straight on this particular personal injury lawyer, on those he fraudulently sued, and on the judge who got to the bottom of it all.
“Gertten has a new personal story to tell and probably a lot of unused footage. He should be a leading candidate for a Sundance grant,” Sullivan said.
Contact: John H. Sullivan
916-443-4900