The Trader

THE TRADER is a Sundance Festival prize-winning, 23-minute documentary about poverty in the remote rural regions of the desolate Republic of Georgia countryside. A heavyset, unshaven entrepreneur makes his living by buying used clothing and other items in Tbilisi, Georgia's biggest city, and then driving his beat-up van to poor villages. He tries to sell the goods in exchange for kilos of potatoes, the only asset the villagers have. A toothless, limping older woman begs him to give her a grater that she covets, either as a present or for one lari, Georgian currency equivalent to around 40 U.S. cents. She tells him the five kilos of potatoes he's asking is too expensive. "What's wrong with you?" she complains. "I'm old, alone, I have no one." He turns her down. This primitive economy is founded on the villagers doing the back-breaking, tedious work of harvesting potatoes. The implication is that potatoes are a mainstay of their diets. Villagers stoop in the soil to collect the dirty brown ovals that sustain them. According to Georgian statistics, most Georgian farmers have only enough to feed their own families. Obesity is clearly not a problem in these villages. Without narration or explanation, the camera records aching poverty, rusted-out cars, pot-holed or unpaved roads. Authenticity and reality are the goal. In a small home lined with peeling walls, a painfully shy young boy can't find the courage or the words to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The message is clear: No ambition can exist in this soul-crushing deprivation. These people have no way out. When children survey the goods laid out in the van, their faces display astonishment and awe, as if they'd never seen such stuff before. It often feels as if the trader is a kind of evil tempter, trying to part needy villagers from their sustaining potatoes so he can sell them for more elsewhere.