In his 2018 feature documentary Breathless, Daniel Lambo took on the asbestos industry. People in his home village, including members of his family, had suffered devastating consequences because of the industry and he was determined to reveal its impact not just in Belgium but across the developing world.
In his new project, Porto Central (a documentary feature pitch at Connext), Lambo has Shell and the oil industry firmly in his sights.
“Everything starts with this historic court case in the Netherlands in May 2021, where a judge demanded that Shell must comply with the Paris climate calls,” the director remembers the landmark rulings that called on the giant energy company to reduce its CO2 emissions by close to 50%. Inevitably, Shell appealed. It was at this point that Lambo began to investigate. He quickly discovered that Shell was continuing with 750 projects worldwide.
“They [Shell] appealed and they just continued in developing countries,” Lambo notes of how it has been business as usual for the multinational. He was determined not to let them get away with it.
“Usually, that is a motor for my work. When I get kind of angry, I need to do something with this anger,” Lambo says. He realised the project would take a long time and was likely to involve plenty of pushback from the oil industry.
The first step was to look at some of the 750 projects. That was how he stumbled on a massive port being built in Brazil. “There is no low hanging fruit any more for their companies which means easy drilling. They’re looking at quite difficult spots. The one in Brazil is really, really deep. It needs a lot of complex engineering because the oil is underneath a big hardened salt layer,” says Lambo.
The oil field is close to a pristine beach in Espirito Santo in southeast Brazil. It’s here that Shell wanted the port for its new offshore project.
When Lambo was making Breathless, he worked with a small army of lawyers to make sure that everything the film asserted was correct. He will need to be similarly diligent with the new film. After all, the subject team will have its own lawyers.
The director had a very strange experience on Breathless. The documentary was “infiltrated” by a representative of the asbestos industry. This was a British man called Rob Moore (the brother of very high-ranking BBC exec Charlotte Moore) who posed as a journalist and anti-asbestos activist.
Lambo had met Rob Moore at the Sheffield Doc Fest and had been taken in by him. “It’s a warning to all documentary makers – be careful!”
Now, Lambo and his team are very careful about vetting potential collaborators.
Porto Central is again being made with producer Maarten Schmidt at Storyhouse, the production company founded in 2013 and which also got behind Breathless. “I am a bit older than him (Schmidt). At that time, he was an energetic and ambitious young fellow. He actually pointed out to me that the asbestos story, which was indeed personal, was a big story. Sometimes, when you are living in it, you are in the middle of it, you need an outsider to tell you ‘look at this’ from another angle. He inspired me with that and I am very thankful to him. It was quite obvious that we would continue working together. We are a good team.”
During CONNEXT, Lambo will be showing some teaser footage from the new project. He and Schmidt are also looking for further financing. The doc has already been pitched earlier this year at Sunny Side of the Doc.
Lambo takes his carbon footprint seriously. He has therefore decided not to travel to Brazil but will instead work with a local director there. “In this movie, at a certain level, I am questioning my own job as a filmmaker. If I am making a film about an oil company and climate change, I ask myself can I just fly on and off to Brazil to make this movie. I decided for this project that I wouldn’t do it. Secondly, as a filmmaker from the west, well-funded, can I still go to a poor area, a tropical area, film and intervene? Isn’t it better to work with a citizen journalist [from Brazil] and see the story through his eyes…I decided for this project to experiment with this.”
The emails between Lambo and his collaborator will form part of the voice over of the movie. “In these emails, it’s not just information we share. We can actually philosophise about all the problems related to climate change which takes it [the film] to a higher level.”
The port in Brazil is being built with likely Dutch involvement (from the Port of Rotterdam). “That brings it close to home,” the director says of the links between the Netherlands and the Brazilian and the Europeans.
Lambo acknowledges that making Porto Central is likely to be an arduous and stressful endeavour. How does he cope with the pressures of such an endeavour?
“I meditate,” the director laughs. “I love humour also. In some of my projects, I like to mix social relevance and humour. It’s like in the work of Ken Loach which usually ends in the third act with solidarity. Solidarity is what gives you this fuel. It is the oil of the people fighting! It keeps your focus on the hard job…I can feel the injustice being done.”
The director adds that climate change stories like this touch everyone. “There are no jobs on a dead planet…”
