The main ingredient of a good film is a story to share

Cacao Barry’s values have always been the same: providing guidance on farming, ensuring transparency and honesty, being people-driven, maintaining a good relationship with the farm manager, and caring about the product. We wanted to show our admiration for the farmers who remain attached to their land, who stay to work it rather than migrate to the cities, who are tied to the crop.

There is no official, finalised script. There are no actors, no grand and overly elaborate staging. There are only carefully considered images that show nature as it exists on cocoa farms, along with the people who cultivate it. With CacaoCollective, we are creating a turning point to encourage debate and tell people about cocoa.

Between the farms, farmers and travelling, we are once again discovering unique chocolates, unique people, unique places, unique farming techniques. RaRe Chocolates. Local cocoas with unique aromas. Through short films, we show where cocoa, anthropology and culture intersect. We use interviews to better understand people and their work, to feel closer and more connected to them. We also employ a range of visual cues so that each of the stories reaches the viewer in a more direct and personal way, making the film both aesthetically pleasing and surprising.

Images, words, sounds, noises, darkness, landscapes, portraits all show the beauty and mysteries of the plantations cultivated by the farmers. For a few days, we become part of the community and the ecosystem of a cocoa farm. We breathe it, sweat it, criss-cross it. It nourishes us, its insects bite us and its people offer us food and a place to sleep. We watch the people work and relax. We are guests in their homes, trying not to be seen as strangers but as members of a group (the farmers, Cacao Barry and us) who share the same goal.

The main ingredient of a good film is having a story to share, and this is without a doubt what we encounter at the farms we visit.