Hugh Jackman: Dukale’s Dream

Josh Rothstein: Yes, I think that documentary film, as a medium, is a unique medium in that you give your audience an opportunity to experience and learn about issues on a deeper level, by nature of a longer form storytelling format. We, in the case of our film, give our audience an opportunity to not just learn about these key story points and academic issues, but by introducing our audience to an individual like Dukale, we give our audience an opportunity to connect with a human being and not just a statistic. Therefore, we give them the possibility for a deeper level of comprehension and emotional connection to take place, which ideally would lead to a greater desire to become an advocate and have a desire to join the movement. In our case, the movement is becoming a more conscious consumer, a more mindful consumer, an empowered consumer, who has a sense that in their everyday life they have an opportunity to make small decisions that have very large impacts on the planet.

OMTIMES: Based on your experience, how important is fair trade transactions in the development of poor communities?

Josh Rothstein: Fair trade transactions in developing communities, based on my first -hand experience and what I’d seen in Ethiopia and what I’d read about in other regions, can have some extraordinary benefits for individuals in those regions. Specifically it relates to farmers who might otherwise be exploited by middle men. The very nature of the fair trade model is that the individual farmers are part of a cooperative, so in this structure, the farmers, just as unions have served to be so effective here in the Western world, the cooperative serves as a way to not only provide a fair and an equitable price for their products, but also to ensure that safety measures are in place for the farmers and that the farmers as well get to benefit from a level of support and a foundation of support in the community that is essential to their ability to thrive and prosper. Specifically this is done through the essential support of health and educational resources in these communities. Overall, the fair trade structure seems to be, given its strong support from community development programs like the ones we see in Dukale’s Dream, it is apparent that there can be some profound and long lasting sustainable opportunities for prosperity.