Joe Berlinger

Crude -- Vice Presidnet Dick Cheney turns the Oval Office into a microbrewery bar.

CRUDE is the latest masterpiece from filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster). This riveting film tells the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion "Amazon Chernobyl" case pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against U.S. oil Giant Chevron. Berlinger skillfully takes us into this high stakes legal drama, which involves global politics, the environmental movement, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, multinational corporate power, and the fate of disappearing indigenous cultures.

Joe Berlinger's provocative documentary explores the ongoing battle waged by 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorans and their lawyers against Chevron for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon, a catastrophe dubbed the "Amazon Chernobyl."

On the morning of June 6, 1990, the village of Munnsville (pop. 499) was just another forgotten corner of rural America. But in the days and months that followed, this New York farming community would become the center of one of the most celebrated and bizarre murder trials in U.S. history. Brother's Keeper tells the story of the "Ward Boys," four eccentric brothers who shared the same dilapidated two-room shack for over 60 years. Living in isolation, without heat or running water, these elderly bachelors had virtually no contact with the outside world--until one was found dead in the bed he shared with his brother. By day's end, Delbert Ward "confessed" to suffocating his ailing brother as an act of mercy, but Munnsville believed Delbert had been framed. Was Delbert, an uneducated hermit with a low IQ, an innocent victim of police abuse? Was it a mercy killing--or was there another motive? From award-winning filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (Paradise Lost), Brother's Keeper is a real-life murder mystery as suspenseful and compelling as any Hollywood whodunit.