In 1983-1984, Amos Gitai worked for European television, making commissioned films to be broadcast as current affairs programmes. He travelled across Asia, where he made, one after the other, Ananas and Bangkok-Bahrain, two films dealing with the circulation and exploitation of commodities … Ananas examines the operations of the multinational corporation Castle & Cooke, the world’s largest pineapple producer, which had long before acquired the Dole Pineapple Company, founded in 1900 by James Dole … Ahead of his time, Amos Gitai became interested in globalisation and the decentralisation of industrial production: what, in the 1980s, was still referred to – in Marxist terminology – as “economic imperialism”. From San Francisco to Hawaii, via the Philippines and ending in Japan, the film follows the journey of the pineapple, from the immense plantations stretching as far as the eye can see to the packaging industry, and finally the printing of labels that, at the end of the chain, are pasted on to cans destined for supermarket shelves. Ananas is a meticulous documentary about the production process and the interweaving of economic and financial relations between states and multinational corporations. Beyond the economic activities of a multinational corporation in a region or a state – first Hawaii, which became the 50th US state in 1959, then the Philippines, where labour is far cheaper – the film describes the relationships between a dominant economy and political and military power (at the time, the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines) or religious power (the Dole family, originally from San Francisco, also included missionaries). However, “globalisation” has become a euphemistic term for a regime of domination based on the absolute power of multinational corporations allied with authoritarian or military regimes. This is what the film reveals and, in a certain sense, demonstrates: Filipino workers, men and women alike, are exploited, whether labouring in the fields or on factory assembly lines.

Serge Toubiana, Exils et territoires. Le cinéma d’Amos Gitai, Cahiers du cinéma,
Paris 2003