Toronto, Canada, Sept. 9--A provocative, entertaining, and at times chilling documentary that explores the role of corporations in our lives will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival today and it is bound to have people buzzing. "The Corporation," from Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, examines the nature and history of corporations and includes specific examples of corporate deception, including media bias.
Through interviews with 42 people, among them company CEOs, thinkers, activists, and whistleblowers, including Ray Anderson of Interface, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and executives from Pfizer, Goodyear, and Royal Dutch Shell, "The Corporation" asks some pointed questions that offer a generally unflattering portrait of increasingly global businesses. indieWIRE screened the film last week and spoke with the filmmakers this weekend, ahead of Tuesday's debut at the Toronto festival.
At the core of the movie, which includes a collection of stories illustrated with archival footage, is a diagnosis of the corporation as meeting the criteria of a psychopath. Noting that corporations are designated as legal persons under the law, the filmmakers explore the personality of this "person" and arrive at their diagnosis through examples that detail corporate harm to workers, humans, animals, and the biosphere.
Some of the most damning criticism of corporations comes from a corporate executive, CEO Ray Anderson of Interface, the world's largest carpet tile manufacturer. Anderson had a major environmental "epiphany" and decided to re-organize his business as a result. Also, of particular interest given the recent actions of the FCC to allow wider media ownership by the largest entertainment companies, will be the film's exploration of Fox News pressuring its reporters to kill a story that exposed links to cancer in a synthetic Monsanto bovine milk hormone.
"It's complicated," Achbar said. "We're not out to attack individual corporations, what we are trying to provide is an analysis of the institution--it was almost arbitrary which corporations we chose to illustrate the various points."
But Bakan acknowledged that some companies may be concerned. "We are now living in a time where simply questioning or trying to tell the truth about corporations and their power is perceived as a threat," writer Joel Bakan told indieWIRE. "I think there is paranoia (and) usually paranoia develops in a system when it feels threatened--I see this paranoia with some optimism."
Bakan, who wrote the film, is also author of the forthcoming book, "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," which will bepublished by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. in March. The film marks a close collaboration between Bakar, who wrote the book while the film was in production, and film co-irector Achbar. The film is based on the same research contained in the complementary book, yet additional interviews are available in each.
