LUCID FORGE

There’s been no shortage lately of documentaries chronicling the reasons why the company that constitutes the world’s 23 largest economy has such a negative effect on American and global business. Certainly Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices is the most well known, but he’s the top of a very tall pyramid of activist films against the company fronted by the Smiley Face.

Andrew Munger says that his film, Wal-Mart Nation, is not an anti-Wal-Mart film, it’s not even an activist film. “It appears that way because it’s about activists,” Munger said in an interview last Sunday. “I gave Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart supporters opportunity to speak in the film and I won’t pretend that they got equal time, but I think that’s a false idea of what balance is.” Munger’s film originally aired on CBC and Newsworld last fall, and since that time, he’s been travelling around the US and Canada with it, showing the documentary at film festivals and screenings, including two showings at the Bookshelf in Guelph Ontario on April 13th. It’s fitting that Munger brings his film to Guelph personally because such a large part of it takes place in the Royal City. Munger covered much of the final leg of Bill Bennett and Jim Profit’s efforts to thwart the construction of a Wal-Mart store at the intersection of Highways 6 and 7 in the city’s north end. Along with Bennett and Profit, Munger profiles Labour organizers and community activists who are each fighting Wal-Mart for their own reasons. Munger also interviews key Wal-Mart Canada management as well as getting access to the corporation’s annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas. Such an even handed approach doesn’t mean that Munger’s won any kind of middle ground in the debate; some people have told him that he was too hard on the retail giant while others say that he went too soft. “I stand by the research, I stand by the information and I think it’s a fair film,” he said. Munger credits timing as the reason he got the type of access he was able to get from Wal-Mart. The company, caught in a wave of bad press, was willing to engage more with the media. Ironically, the well oiled machine that is Wal-Mart had no effective communications strategy, according to Munger.

It took six months of preparation and negotiation to get into the shareholders meeting that’s seen in the film, explained Munger. “I give them credit, they took a chance and they were willing to be open with me.”

Also open with Munger were the various activists he profiled. “I wanted to present a variety of types of activists and characters,” Munger says of the reasons why he chose to profile the people he did. “The story isn’t interesting, if the characters aren’t interesting and I thought in Bill Bennett, Al Norman, Anna Lui and Carolyn Sapp, they all had personal back stories that I thought were interesting and I tried to make them as interesting as the activism they were involved in.”

Of course, Carolyn Sapp was Munger’s ace, as a former Miss America, she’s uniquely able to get attention in a way most anti-Wal-Mart activists can’t. “It attracts attention to the cause, it attracts attention to the film as well,” says Munger. “Plus, she’s an unusual type of activist, she’s not the type of person you’d expect to be involved in labour and feminist activism.”

Of course, the problem with tackling subject matter that’s constantly evolving and developing is that the end of the story is truly in the hands of the filmmaker. “That was really hard, to know when to stop,” says Munger, who joked with his CBC editor that they could keep making this movie over and over again because of how quickly the story changed.

“I decided when I had the stories I felt were important and that we had a snapshot of the Wal-Mart issue at this point. I knew that film would, in some sense, become dated fairly quickly, but these issues don’t go away,” he explained.

In the meantime, Munger credits one of the reasons for the “mainstreaming” of anti-Wal-Mart activism to the issue of healthcare in the United States, and the chain’s seemingly inability or unwillingness to provide their employees with adequate health coverage.

In the US, 11 states are suing Wal-Mart to recoup medicare costs after the company had its employees go on state-sponsored healthcare rather than paying for it out of pocket. A more recent example is the case of Debbie Shank, a Missouri woman who was sued by Wal-Mart for the settlement money she received for injuries from a 2000 car accident. Wal-Mart was trying to recover the costs of Shank’s medical expenses, but the company eventually agreed to allow Shank to keep the money after a public outcry.

Munger’s feeling from talking to people on the ground during the course of filming is that while there’s a still a disconnect between the people and message, that may be slowly changing.

“What I find interesting is that a lot of people feel guilty about shopping at Wal-Mart and they’re not even sure why. But people are starting to make a connection between the low prices and the low wages. People, I think, are starting to wake up that there’s a cost: the high cost of low prices.”

You can find out more about Andrew Munger and Wal-Mart Nation at www.walmartnation.com