Miki Mistrati’s The Chocolate War, which premiered at CPH:DOX 2022, is an eye-opening thriller doc chronicling one man’s fight against a billion-dollar industry, convicted of child trafficking and slavery.
Miki Mistrati’s third film about the dark side of the chocolate industry in West Africa is a gripping and important investigation from American Human Rights lawyer on child trafficking and slavery. The film received its World Premiere at CPH:DOX 2022. Denmark’s largest documentary festival and one of the most prestigious in the world kicked off on March 23rd, and we are glad to be part of it. This year’s edition hosts more than 200 films with 76 new titles premiering at the festival. Among the titles we were delighted to discover is The Chocolate War (Chokoladekrigen) by Danish director Miki Mistrati, nominated for the F:Act Award – CPH:DOX’s prize for journalistic films in the large format.
Unlike his two previous films The Dark Side of Chocolate and Shady Chocolate where the director became the lead character, in the third installment, we are focusing on Terry Collingsworth, an American Human Rights Lawyer who has dedicated his life to fighting some of the world’s biggest corporations. Here is the context: about twenty years ago, the world’s biggest cocoa procucers signed an agreement to end child slavery but the appalling abuse has only got worse, and today, about 1.5 million children are working in plantations, in Ivory Coast and Ghana alone. Collingsworth is trying to get big companies such as Nestlé or Cargill convicted of systematically exploiting children in Ivory Coast’s cocoa production but to prepare for the trial, Collingsworth will gather more pieces of evidence.
The first heartbreaking moment of the film comes in when we are exposed to some footage from 2006 showing Malian children who were abducted in Ivory Coast. We are told their gut-wrenching stories about illegal child labor in cocoa plantations. Collingsworth travels to Mali to meet his six key witnesses in their twenties and this proves even more heartbreaking to see, as they are have been surviving for all these years. The journey continues through Ivory Coast, but turns ironic when a center for the rehabilitation of enslaved children, supported by governments, looks unused and with no children in sight. Mistrati’s observation of the villages gives this film a fresh look at some of the unknown places and the origins of our sweet chocolate bar. And as a piece of investigative journalism, it is successful in exposing the unseen and the dark side of the chocolate industry.
Aside from being an excellent intimate investigation, the film is backed by Marius Christiansen’s dramatic score, which establishes a tense atmosphere from the start and lets the viewer connect to the intensity; sometimes sad, sometimes mad. Although this artifice may appear to be overly dramatic, the film remains an eye-opening piece on one man’s fight against a billion-dollar industry, represented by some chocolate-giants which ruthlessly exploit children to secure their production. The Chocolate War is overall a gripping exposé, an absorbing and important investigation on child trafficking and slavery.
