When you are not getting enough information from the media, you have to dig deeper. Directors of The Big Fix investigate one of history’s worst oil spills – and it isn’t pretty.
The effect of the 2010 Deepwater Horizons oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is ‘not something you can grasp just by looking at dirty birds’, says journalist Jeff Goodell in The Big Fix. This sums up what this film is all about.
Shattered lives in Louisiana, people with serious health problems, coughing dolphins, ruined businesses and obvious signs of corruption are just a few consequences of the spill (not just oil-slicked birds). And filmmakers Joshua Tickell and his wife Rebecca are exposing them.
Being from Louisiana themselves, the filmmakers discover that the stories coming from the mainstream media about the aftermath of the spill don’t match the stories of their friends and family. They decide to hunt for answers.
They want to know what part BP plays in the aftermath of the oil spill. Why are the people who live by the coast having health problems? Why are Tickell and his crew not allowed on the beach at night, what is BP trying to cover up? Why is BP not being penalised harder by the government?
The Big Fix is one big revelation. Even though most of the findings have been reported before – by Goodell in The Rolling Stone, for example – the discoveries hit hard.
By getting celebrities like Peter Fonda and Jason Mraz on board, Joshua and Rebecca manage to attract quite a lot of attention to their cause. The stories of the people affected by the disaster are very moving and together with a brilliant choice of music and the “Canon style” camera work, I was truly touched. The use of graphs and animations makes some complex stories easy to grasp.
Towards the end of the 112-minute long film the pieces of the puzzle come together and your only reaction is shock, especially because Rebecca Tickell is now dealing with health problems herself due to exposure to toxic gasses while she was on the beaches in Louisiana making the documentary.
The Big Fix is an exposure of modern day corruption, but it is also a cry for awareness. Joshua and Rebecca ask the audience to think about their own possibilities to use bio fuel to be able to avoid disasters like these in the future and end the film with the big question: Where do you stand?
