Pistachio Wars Trailer

Pistachio Wars Trailer - official movie trailer HD

Transcript

00:01Behind these gates is one of the biggest mansions in Beverly Hills.

00:04The people who live here aren't movie stars, they're farmers.

00:07The biggest in California.

00:09Stewart and Linda Resnick.

00:11They make those crazy pistachio ads.

00:13Before the Resnicks, people barely ate these things.

00:16The entire demand was created by marketing.

00:18Sales of pistachios have not skyrocketed in the last 30 seconds.

00:23Well, let's take care of that.

00:24When we started filming, California was in the middle of its worst drought in history.

00:32And the thing about pistachios, it takes a lot of water to grow them.

00:36In a single year, the Resnick's farms use more water than San Francisco uses for a decade.

00:44We're in a struggle now for a commodity that's short and is water.

00:48The Resnick's, they got into farming almost by accident.

00:51First buying up land from oil companies.

00:52It turned out, not only were their farms right on top of an active oil field,

00:56they were using oil waste water to irrigate their crops.

01:01Most oil fields produce water as a waste product.

01:05Chevron takes that water and brings it into agricultural use.

01:09Over the course of the century, the Central Valley was converted from a lush natural habitat

01:14into a high-tech agricultural wasteland.

01:17We're getting a lot of benzene and ethyl benzene.

01:19Historically, Iran has always been the world's biggest exporter of pistachios.

01:31After the Iranian revolution, the U.S. embargo allowed California's tiny industry to get a global foothold.

01:37When we dug into some records, we found that the Resnicks were giving millions to all sorts of lobby groups

01:42who were hawkish on Iran.

01:44What is Iran doing around the world?

01:46Well, they're funding terrorism.

01:49South of the Resnicks' fields, you can find a giant water bank.

01:53In the 90s, they lobbied to privatize it, and they got it for basically nothing.

01:57It's hard to fully grasp what private control of California's water supply really means.

02:02Why does no one talk about it?

02:04Why? Because they are afraid.

02:06Money.

02:07Money.

02:08Money.