Minamata

A documentary on the appalling tale of the Japanese village of Minamata, whose inhabitants were systematically poisoned by effluent from a nearby factory. It strips away the trendiness from the pollution issue, but makes it all too easy to localise the problem by concentrating on the victims of one primitive fishing village. What becomes plain is that the necessary area for investigation must be the firms and individuals who live off this degree of human agony, rather than primarily the victims.