4/14/2023 0 Comments Last man standing documentary![]() ![]() “The US also has a long history of forced removals and mistreatment of indigenous and black communities, so I wasn’t surprised to see that connection between the two countries,” he told the South African news outlet City Press. Glustrom screened Mossville at the Zamdela township, Sasolburg, and the Durban International Film Festival. The company played a vital role in supplying the country’s energy needs.Īctivist Samson Mokoena of the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance injects internationalism into the documentary, stressing the “connectivity” of the anti-Sasol struggles of what he calls “disposable” people from Louisiana to Africa, whether they be dispossessed indigenous tribesmen or Mossville’s outcasts. Sasol was formed in 1950 in the face of international ostracism due to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Encircled by the denuded landscape, cutoff from local utilities and plagued by health problems, the 49-year-old lives off-the-grid in a trailer on the patch of ground he owns and has fenced off from encroachments.Īlthough most scenes were lensed in Mossville, detailing the effects Sasol’s project is wreaking there, the narrative is intercut with sequences filmed on location in Secunda, a Black township in South Africa that was the site of two African National Congress attacks against Sasol in 1980 dramatized in the 2006 movie Catch a Fire. Photo provided.Īll of Ryan’s neighbors eventually leave the town, but he refuses to budge, and ends up becoming the last man standing in Mossville. Encircled by a denuded, polluted landscape, Ryan lives off-the-grid in a trailer on the patch of ground he owns. He clings on to the past, refusing to leave his land and legacy by taking Sasol’s buyout offer. Among them are lifelong resident Stacey Ryan, who has lost many relatives due to cancer suspected to be caused by the nearby industrial behemoths. Mossville follows the struggles of a handful of the town’s residents who strive to survive as economic over-development overwhelms their homes and way of life as their once-thriving town turns into a fenceline community. Glustrom’s camera reveals the price being paid by the formerly Black and proud town, with aerial vistas revealing a deforested bleak moonscape where once, presumably, a village amidst flora thrived.Īccording to the documentary, the last nail in Mossville’s coffin, is the arrival of South African Synthetic Oil Limited (Sasol), a multi-billion dollar integrated energy and chemical firm that has operated a plant in the town since 2001, proposed as a $21.2 billion expansion project. If the Black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida were destroyed by race riots in the 1920’s, Mossville is being upended by the 14 petrochemical plants that have surrounded it following the Great Depression, bringing with them toxic emission and spills that have been making residents sick at unprecedented rates. This unique African American enclave provided a refuge from segregation and Jim Crow, evolving a singular history which now, according to Glustrom’s chronicle, faces extinction. Founded in 1790 by ex-slave Jack Moss years before slave-owning President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, over time the unincorporated town near Lake Charles was settled by formerly enslaved people and at its peak grew to 8,000 inhabitants. Photo provided.Ī quote from poet Maya Angelou opens the 75-minute film, portentously followed by shots of Black gravediggers at a cemetery, then of an industrial complex at Mossville with smokestacks spewing fumes. ![]() Ryan ends up becoming the last man standing in the town. As the pandemic’s unequal impact on people of color comes to light, Alexander Glustrom’s Mossville: When Great Trees Fall focuses on how industrial and so-called development projects disproportionately harm what political philosopher Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the Earth.” The award-winning documentary paints a powerfully poignant portrait of environmental racism, as one man in a small rural Louisiana town confronts the consequences of what is essentially a takeover by a gigantic energy and chemical company, Mossville follows the struggles of a handful of the town’s residents, including Stacy Ryan, who strive to survive as their once-thriving town turns into a fenceline community.
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