Film Review: Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow

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International Third World Studies Journal and Review, Volume XVII, 2006

Film Review: Between Midnight and the Rooster’s Crow

(2005), Nadja Drost

Edward Abplanalp

Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE 68182-0265

In Between Midnight and The Rooster’s Crow (2005),

a determined first-time Canadian filmmaker Nadja Drost

gets up close to the domination of the natural environment

of Ecuador and its beautiful people. Her documentary, which

was filmed in Ecuador in 2003, gives the viewer a piercing

glimpse at how the Calgary based EnCana Corporation tries

to portray itself as a good corporate citizen, while at the

same time behaving as a shameless oil and gas giant that

has lost its moral compass. In her documentary, which is a

timely object lesson in corporate led globalization, Drost

takes the viewer to regions within the Amazon rainforest

where oil is presently being extracted, and then visits por-

tions of a controversial new 500 km pipeline that runs

through the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. Those who are not

acquainted with Ecuador’s recent past will no doubt be

aghast at the environmental and human rights abuses in-

volved in the brutal plundering of Ecuador’s black gold.

The story behind her movie is as complicated as it is

distressing. For reasons that remain disputed, Ecuador suf-

fered an economic crisis in the late 1990s and was bailed

out by international creditors such as the International Mon-

etary Fund (IMF). As a result, Ecuador—which is Latin

America’s second largest oil producer—now has a crushing

amount of debt. Although the country possesses oil reserves

worth billions of dollars, over half the country’s citizens

still live in poverty. With the structural adjustment policies

currently in place, a major portion of Ecuador’s oil wealth

must leave the country to pay off the IMF and other credi-

tors. Furthermore, while the people can legitimately own

the land and its bounty, the Ecuadorian government owns

what wealth is found under the surface. Consequently, since

oil revenues constitute about half of Ecuador’s budget, the

government tends to be cozy with corporations who will

help quench Ecuador’s thirst for foreign investment. Drost’s

film, which was made on a shoestring budget of $35,000,

seems to confirm what some claim: that this has led to a

destructive climate of opportunistic cronyism in which the

Ecuadorian government will aid and abet transnational cor-

porations in the trampling of human rights and the natural

environment.

To begin with, it has long been known that Ecuador

has vast resources of petroleum wealth, and although the

locus of Drost’s film is Canada’s largest corporation, EnCana

(which at the time of her shooting was Ecuador’s largest

investor), other companies have been involved in the com-

plex scramble for Ecuador ’s oil. Besides Petroecuador

(Ecuador’s state oil company), Shell Oil received a conces-

sion to operate in Ecuador in 1937, in 1964 Ecuador gave

the Texaco Petroleum and Gulf Oil consortium a conces-

sion, and Texaco (now ChevronTexaco) actively produced

oil in the Ecuadorian Oriente from 1972–1990. At the out-

set of Between Midnight and The Rooster’s Crow the viewer

beholds the marvels of the Amazon Rainforest in and around

the stunning Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve unpleasantly jux-

taposed with pools of oil waste, gas flares, and the foul stench

of crude oil bubbling up from the ground. This part of the

Ecuadorian Amazon (the Tarapoa block) was under the in-

fluence of City, the Cayman Company, and the Southern

Union Production Company, after they made an agreement

with the government of Ecuador in 1973.

But now the story gets really complex. In 1977, The

Cayman Company and the Sothern Union Production Com-

pany left the project, and City became City Ecuadorian Pro-

duction Company (CEPCO). In 1996 Canadian Pacalta Re-

sources Ltd bought out CEPCO, and in 1999 Alberta En-

ergy Company (AEC) bought out Pacalta. Then, in April of

2002, AEC and PanCanadian Energy merged to form

Encana, which is now Canada’s biggest company. If the story

concerning the right to drill for oil in the Tarapoa region of

the Amazon seems dizzying and hard to follow, one must

wonder what must it seem like to the indigenous peoples

who have seen the rights to their traditional lands change in

a rapid and stupefying series of mergers and buyouts made

by executives thousands of miles away who could not pos-

sibly appreciate the value of the wilderness being despoiled.

Drost’s film documents that the locals are often confused

themselves as to who is the actual operator. How ironic it is

that the lexicon of today’s corporate management is filled

with phrases such as “corporate responsibility,” and “stew-

ardship.” One must ask: wouldn’t being a responsible stew-

ard entail the ability to maintain and sustain good relation-

ships with important corporate stakeholders such as mem-

bers of the local community and the natural environment?

The habitual capitalist pattern of make-a-quick-buck-and-

run continued in 2005 when EnCana—whose 2004 earn-

ings were a whopping $3.5 billion (U.S.)—sold its assets in

Ecuador to the Chinese for $1.42 billion (U.S.).

After giving her viewers a crash course in Canadian oil

development in Ecuador and acclimating them to the un-

pleasant sights of the destruction of the Amazonian