Strong Coffee: The Story of Cafe Femenino
Canada, 2007, 48 mins
Director: Sharron Bates IN ATTENDANCE
Producers: Sharron Bates, Carmen Klotz IN ATTENDANCE
Website
3:00pm, Sun, Nov 4
at Library
Description
Coffee. It is the second most valuable item of legal international trade after oil. Billions of us drink it every day, but how many of us really know much about the coffee we consume or the farmers who grow it?
There are thousands of coffee farms in northern Peru, employing hundreds of thousands of people, of whom approximately 30% are women. The attitudes toward Peruvian women in remote farming areas are shaped by the culture of machismo, and poverty. Seventy per cent have experienced some sort of violence. It is this repression that drove women to come up with an idea that would give them some financial independence from the men in their community and within their families. Their idea was to create Café Femenino, a women's coffee co-op. Café Femenino is a truly unique concept which is breaking the chains of machismo, improving relationships between women and men, increasing levels of education and improving quality of life.
STRONG COFFEE is an informative look at what it takes to get coffee into your morning cup and what your coffee purchase means to the farmers toiling in the world's coffee
belt.
