The Coca-Cola Case (Short Version)
2009 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Germán Gutiérrez, Carmen Garcia
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
American activists pursue Coca-Cola bottlers in court over paramilitary killings of Colombian union leaders, following a trio's legal campaign against the soft-drink company.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a righteous corporate-takedown doc, but what makes it genuinely weird is how it refuses the catharsis—the legal system grinds without resolution, the activists remain trapped in procedure, and you're left watching capitalism's boring immune system defend itself. It's almost a horror film about bureaucracy.
A formally precise essay in the tradition of legal-process documentaries, where the measured pacing and deliberate accumulation of testimony create an argument through structure rather than rhetoric—Gutiérrez and Garcia understand that the real scandal lives in procedure and sustained attention, not in outrage.
The decision to stay with the activists' faces during courtroom defeats—letting the camera linger on exhaustion rather than cut away—does more to convey their actual struggle than any montage of injustice could; that restraint transforms a 52-minute doc into something that feels lived-in.