Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast?

This is an old educational filmstrip that was shown to a friend of mine when he was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He remembered the film and tracked it down through his old teacher. Finding the content interesting, and being surprised that it had been shown in a public school, we decided to preserve it for the ages. This meant cutting up the filmstrip and scanning dozens of images, attempting to adjust for the faded colors and scratches throughout. The audio is still in pretty degraded shape, having come from cassette.

The narration examines the products we use everyday, and the global impact of the corporations that create them. It focuses particularly on the Gulf and Western corporation and their role in sugar harvesting in the Dominican Republic. I do not know when this filmstrip was produced (judging by the clothing and hairstyles, I would guess the late 70's or early 80's), so the information presented is obviously no longer up-to-date.

The topic of the negative effects of globalization is now something of a hot button issue, with WTO conferences provoking violent demonstrations around the world. I don't know if there was as much awareness or sensitivity to these issues in the early 1980's, which makes this filmstrip a curiosity to me.

The recent Hubert Sauper documentary "Darwin's Nightmare" takes a look at the current negative effects of globalization being felt in Tanzania, and I would encourage anyone who finds this filmstrip interesting to seek out that film as well.

One caveat: the filmstrip is broken into two parts and total running time is about 20 minutes.