Films use similar language when telling their story, it’s hard to reinvent the wheel, but it’s the little differences in the language that make it interesting. Viewers probably remember Citizen Kane‘s rotating newspapers, or that laptop and phone screens feature in films a lot nowadays. Maybe it’s just timing, or maybe there’s something about When Banana Ruled uses archive print that stands out. The print that the documentary uses, by the way, includes archive letters that the members of the Central American bourgeoisie wrote. They teamed up with robber barons from the United States. And together, they manoeuvred political entities to get banana plantations to exploit both nature and its workers. Contextualising the images we see on screen is someone’s narration. There’s a coldness to this narration but it somehow works to cushion the information it’s delivering to us.

I’m loving that word ‘nuance’ more recently but it’s not like it doesn’t warrant that love, and When Banana Ruled has that nuance. Yes, robber barons are the driving force behind the banana industry. But it’s a bit more complex than that, as the doc explains. These are a new generation of barons. They’re different from ones that escaped their punishment from enslaving people during the Gilded Age. When Banana Ruled focuses on a few entrepreneurs who started out struggling, made their money in the banana business. And then, they yanked out the ladder so that others couldn’t climb up the way they did. The main company who started the banana plantations are the United Fruit Company. Cuyamel and Dole had similar stories, eventually merging with or competing with UFC to dominate and exploit Central and South American countries.

When Banana Ruled shows the production side of this, which I may get to later, but it also uses different archive footage to show other facets of the banana industry’s expansion. UFC spread awareness through product placements. They paid for cartoons. Viewers can see Carmen Miranda wearing banana hats, and Charlie Chaplin eating bananas. It adds further contextualization through interviews with historians like Jefferey Jones, who spoke of how both the barons and ‘elected’ leaders in Centra; and South American countries suppressed communism. Yes, all of these interviews are from white academics but they’re still illuminating. This mid length doc has the same vibe as a Rem Koolhas one that OVID acquired months ago. Maybe I care about the subject this time around, or maybe it actually gets the balance of informing without outrage.

Watch When Banana Ruled on OVID.