E.U.E.U.O, a journey into Common Agricultural Policy
An entertaining view of the common agricultural policy.
Nick Fraser and Ben Lewis follow up their satirical and polemical film about the bubble of Brussels, RUEU, with a valiant and determined effort to understand the Common Agricultural Policy.
This may sound like a dull subject for a TV programme but Nick’s efforts to find just how the CAP spends 43 billion Euros on a system of subsidies, administration and tariffs becomes more a larger-than-life satire than standard current affairs programme.
After 12 weeks on the road talking to everyone from farmers to politicians to consumers, his answer? “Madness!”.
At the heart of the EUEUO! is Nick’s journey following the doomed attempts to reform the CAP. The Germans are desperate for change – the French determined to resist. Why? The French get almost £2 billions out of the CAP – the Germans put in £3 billions.
As the arguments over reform move from Brussels to Paris, Berlin and then the Copenhagen summit, different national characteristics are revealed.
The French want to preserve their gourmet culture that the rest of Europe subsidies. The disciplined Germans want to convert the rest of us to a pure and healthy diet of organic food. The nostalgic, garden-obsessed but free-market Brits want a few subsidies to pay for hedgerows, but want to get rid of everything else.
On the way Nick presents European agriculture ministers with a birthday cake to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the CAP and endures the stench of manure in almost every EU country he visits.
Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, author and art critic, whose films have been shown by the BBC, Channel 4, Arte, PBS, Al-Jazeera, ABC-Australia and other major broadcasters around the world. Over the years he has won various awards including a Peabody, Grierson, US National Headliner and German Grimme Prize, and his films have been shown in exhibitions in public museums in Britain and Germany.
Ben’s latest feature documentaries “Chancers – the Great Gangster Film Fraud” and ‘A Banker’s Guide to Art were shown on the BBC in January 2016. Falciani’s Tax Bomb opened the Barcelona documentary festival in 2015, was one of three films nominated for the German Fernsehpreis, and was broadcast on ARD, Arte and many other European channels. “Google and the World Brain” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013 and was shown on the BBC, Arte, Al-Jazeera-US and at 60 film festivals. My 2012 film “Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty” was also shown on over 70 TV channels.
Some of his feature documentaries and televised series’ have been on highly topical subjects and have provoked public debate and influenced political decision-making. ‘The Great Contemporary Art Bubble’ stimulated an international controversy, still continuing today, about the art market in 2009, while ‘Blowing Up Paradise: French Nuclear Testing in the Pacific” (2004) is credited with influencing the French government’s decision to compensate its soldiers and citizens who suffered illnesses after working on atomic installations in Tahiti.
Ben also writes as a historian and art critic. ‘Hammer and Tickle’, a history of humour under Communism was published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in Britain in 2008 and in America, Brazil, Poland, Italy, among other countries, in the following years. This year has seen the publication of Ben’s first monograph on an artist, ‘David Hepher: Grain of Concrete’. In the past Ben has written articles published in Die Welt, Prospect Magazine, Sunday Telegraph, The Observer, Financial Times, Liberation, etc.
Nick Fraser
Broadcast
until january first, 2012
Europe
Arte (France-Allemagne) SVT (Suède) NRK (Norvège) YLE (Finlande) MTV (Hongrie) TV2 (Danemark) Marfilms (Portugal)
Africa & Middle East
Cable TV for educational purpose (Israël)
International Sales
Coproduction / presales
Bergman pictures
Starling
Arte GEIE
BBC (UK)
YLE (Finland)
SVT (Sweden)
TVE (Spain)
TV2 (Denmark)