Much of the focus of the film is on one man, Tadesse Meskela, a confident and even-tempered man who manages a coffee farmers co-op in Ethiopia. Meskela represents over 74,000 to coffee wholesalers and companies around the world, trying to negotiate a decent price for the cooperative's beans. The film follows Meskela through meetings with the members of the co-op to a meeting with a group of coffee retailers in London to a coffee trade show, where he sits in a virtually empty part of a convention center urging the few people that visit him to purchase his union's beans.

It seems like a Herculean task to be placed on one man's shoulders, but the affable Meskela bears it with humility and a grace that might get lost on many others in his same position. The only point in the film where he seems vaguely frustrated is a simple, yet impactful scene where he digs through the coffee section of a London supermarket and is crestfallen to find that only one of the brands was made from beans that his farmers have harvested.

Those quiet moments in the film that give the film so much of its emotional weight. Probably the best example of this is a section that starts in the first Starbucks shop in Seattle, where we get to hear the manager toe the party line about the "lives that we're touching," and moves to Sidama, the region that supplies Starbucks' coffee where a feeding center for children suffering from famine. It’s a heartbreaking sequence, especially as you see one rail-thin child turned away from the center because he doesn't meet all the criteria necessary for assistance. It's positively heartbreaking.

The film goes further into the inequality of the global trade market but it is in these simple expressions of the ripple effect of each dollar that we spend that helps the movie linger with you. Black Gold is a truly inspirational piece of work. Not one that will leave you cheering at the end, but motivated instead to think twice before picking up that quad-shot two pumps vanilla caramel inside and out nonfat latte.

The digital video is rendered nicely on this DVD as is the soundtrack.

Directors' Q&A Al-Jazeera Fabulous Picture Show
Directors' Q&A with Channel 4's Jon Snow
Live at Sundance/The making of the soundtrack
Tadesse - The latest
A Message from Tadesse: What you can do
Trailer