A crude Awakening, the oil crash

Reading Time: < 1 minute

What makes a good documentary is the quality of the interviews and how they are put together to inform and educate us on the topic they are tackling. A Crude Awakening – The Oil Crash is a perfect example of this. Using a great wealth of interviews and archive material it illustrates why the current consumption of oil is unsustainable. It is well constructed and has a strong message.

Basil Gelpke, born in 1962, in Basel, Switzerland has had an interesting career. He studied anthropology, economics, and the production of scientific films. He went from working in advertising to 24hr news with the European Business channel during which he got promoted to become the channel’s Paris correspondent. On assignment in South East Asia he was one of the first journalists to venture into Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. He would later help setup N-TV, a 24hr news channel in Berlin. He did some work on the Swiss Survivor series and “Expedition Robinson” programs. In 2002 he read a paper from the Sydney based Hedge Fund on the topic of decreasing oil reserves and spent many years researching the documentary before finishing this documentary for a screening at SXSW2006.

Look out for this documentary, it’s an interesting piece of documentary making.