Film Festival 09 - A Blooming Business
A Blooming Business
The Netherlands 2009, 52m
Director: Ton van Zantvoort
Many of the roses that brighten the homes and work places of Europe
are air-freighted from Africa. Dutch Ton van Zantvoort was making a
doco about special needs children in Kenya when he met Jane, the
mother of two such children, and was moved by her appalling
circumstances to look into the wider social impact of the nurseries
in Naivasha where she worked and which are among Kenya's biggest
employers. Keeping Jane's life central, he also talks with other
workers, several of whom have risked their lives to film working
conditions. Meanwhile any traditional inhabitants of the land who
haven't been subsumed by the rose plantations struggle to feed
themselves from a lake diminished by diversion to the nurseries and
polluted by chemical usage. The special power of van Zantvoort's
film lies in his illumination of the experience of those at the
bottom of the heap. Though he describes himself as a poet, not a
journalist, he too risked his life to expose the violence inflicted
on them by their conspicuously unfilmable exploiters.
In English and Swahili, with English subtitles
