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DUST - THE GREAT ASBESTOS TRIAL

POLVERE - IL GRANDE PROCESSO DELL'AMIANTO

By Andrea PRANDSTRALLER, Niccolò BRUNA

Documentary - Completed 2011

An exceptional trial is taking place in Turin. For the first time ever, the accused are the main stakeholders of asbestos companies spread in 32 countries around the world.

- Year of production
- 2011
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY, SWITZERLAND, BELGIUM
- Languages
- ENGLISH, BRAZILIAN-PORTUGUESE
- Duration
- 85 mn
- Director(s)
- Andrea PRANDSTRALLER, Niccolò BRUNA
- Writer(s)
- Andrea PRANDSTRALLER, Niccolò BRUNA
- Producer(s)
- Enrica CAPRA (GraffitiDoc), Isabelle TRUC (Iota Productions), Tiziana SOUDANI (Amka Films)
- Synopsis
- Most people believe that Asbestos is a problem of the past, but this is far from the truth.
  Asbestos production has once again begun to rise in the world, due to the great extent of its consumption in countries like India, China and Russia. The lobby of the production countries, headed by Canada, is as powerful as ever and works on an international level to influence politics of single countries and of international organizations. Its power is so great that in the state of Sao Paolo, in Brasil, the law that banned the use of asbestos, approved last year, had to be withdrawn.
  It is in this perspective that the first criminal trial against the great executives of asbestos starts in Turin.
  The charge is severe: voluntary manslaughter and omission of sanitary precautions. The accused are two of the major stockholders of Eternit, the Swiss-Belgian industrial giant that for seventy years dominated the world market. The defense states that the chief executives were not aware of the direct link between the inhalation of asbestos fibers and pleural cancer. According to the fifty lawyers that work for the Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny and for the Belgian marquis Louis de Cartier de Marchienne, production of asbestos terminated as soon as the association between the illness and the inhalation of the fiber was demonstrated and became law, in the early 90’s. The death of three thousand people, between factory workers and citizens of Casale Monferrato, would be, in their view, caused by lack of information of which not only the two accused can be held responsible for.
  To the prosecutors the task of demonstrating that the information about the hazardous nature of asbestos was widely available long before the European law imposed the shutting down of the plants, and that the omission of health and safety measures towards its workers is equivalent to the liability of their death.
- Partners & financing
- AMKA FILMS Prodctions, Iota Production, ARTE, SSR SRG, RSI, RTBF
- Beginning of shooting
- Dec 01, 2009