PINK RIBBONS INC

It’s questionable if filmmaker Lea Pool’s investigation into the breast cancer movement suffers from the lack of an indignant Michael Moore type expose but it does raise some very pertinent issues about this unwieldy juggernaut of a crusade that some think may now be out of control. Pool does however overload us somewhat with a torrent of images of a multitude of money raising walks mixed with interviews of survivors plus with the heads of the two major fundraising foundations interspersed, and a few researchers/experts and the points she is trying to make do occasionally get muddled along the way.

Like it or not, this is a big business. The major player ‘Susan G Korman For The Cure’ is reported to have dispensed some $1.9 billion since 1982. A lot of its income derives from ‘cause marketing’ where The Foundation co-operates with big business on  joint ventures (as opposed to philanthropy where they just hand over donations).Pool questions whether such  partnerships are ethically and morally acceptable when they are with Companies who make products which use chemicals that are linked to cancer themselves. They include giant Cosmetic Corporations such as Avon and Estee Lauder who are eager to give their support to help the Movement even though they are reluctant to give any details about their research into how safe their products are and if in fact they contain ingredients that are contributing factor in the cause of cancer.  Pool may have pointed out these facts, but she never bullied her interviewees into any admission, and in fact she allowed the Marketing Manager of Ford to waffle on with some piffling double-talk that insinuated that cars never do any environmental damage at all.

★★★★★★★★