We’re delighted to present the first of the films produced following the re-launch of the Antipode Film Project in May 2023. The brief was to create something “to further bridge the gaps between academic scholarship and public knowledge, to provide social justice-oriented educators and activists with resources for their work, and to foster critical thinking through creative expression”. The director of “The Pixel and the Plot”, Hannah Meszaros Martin, does all that and more. We’re sure you’ll agree that Hannah is doing work of the utmost importance; to be able to support it is a real privilege. — Andy Kent, Executive Director, The Antipode Foundation
An Antipode Foundation-supported film “The Pixel and the Plot” / “El Pixel y La Parcela” was just released as a part of a massive exposé of the troubled past and present of the detection of coca in Colombia. From the moment that coca was outlawed its presence and destruction began to be quantified and documented. But most of these records are still classified or withheld from the public.
Directed by Hannah Meszaros Martin, the project questions data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the US Department of State, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Colombian Ministry of Defense.
Through working with coca-growing farmers, archival research and remote sensing analysis, the project demonstrates the structural lack of transparency and critical flaws in the methods of capturing and quantifying coca since their inception and the effect of these failures in the escalation of violence in the War on Drugs.
A three-part investigation unfolds the violent history of aerial fumigation during Plan Colombia in the region of Guaviare and its effects on mass deforestation via cattle ranching in the present; the second reveals how the UNODC method of detecting coca cultivation has been flawed since its inception in 1999, carrying grave consequences for those on the ground; and the third looks into the archive of the US DEA and the experimentation of herbicides as an eradication method in the 1980s.
Hannah Meszaros Martin is a filmmaker, researcher and writer who directs Plano Negativo, a Colombia-based visual investigative studio, part of the Investigative Commons network.