Icarus Films has picked Oct. 20 for the DVD debut of
documentary filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's insightful look at the
container shipping industry, The Forgotten Space.
The innocuous shipping container that you see piled high on
cargo ships, zipping along by hundreds on snake-like freight trains and one
right after another attached to truck cabs on the highway. Interchangeable building blocks … in fact, people
have even converted them into housing.
Technically they are intermodal containers and the latest
stats show that there are over 20 million in use worldwide (likely more, since
the data is a couple of years old).
Instead of droning on about the history and uses of these symbols of
commerce, filmmakers Sekula and Burch concentrate the bulk of their essay on
the ways in which container shipping has impacted the lives of diverse — but
connected — people around the world.
The Forgotten Space is presented as a lesson in economic
Darwinism and comes close to being preachy, but points of profound change
brought about by this simple concept are not without merit.
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