The Brussels Business (2012) Reviews

• You think lobbyists only exist in Washington?

  noveneereinhere2013-01-20

  If you think lobbyists only exist in Washington and not in the EU you'll want to see this documentary. In it Friedrich Moser and Matthieu Lietaert try to explain how the decisions made in Brussels have been and are being influenced by lobbyist organisations. Four out of five policy decisions in an average EU country are made in Brussels. But who is actually making them? Behind the EU façade are more than 15,000 lobbyists, with a mission to influence the politics in favour of their clients interest. Every decision has a price. The question is who is paying. In the film we follow two men, one is a political activist fighting against lobbying corruption by a watchdog organisation in Brussels. The other is a "top of the league" lobbyist in European and international trade issues. We tag along behind the scenes of the biggest economic powers in the world, and get glimpse of how big corporations are impinging upon the average EU-citizens life. The U.S. lobbying system is often criticized - but is the European really any better?

• Very slow paced documentary

  jebanadupa2013-05-30

  Long shots of pages of documents with single words in focus and the rest left blurry might have some artistic impact, but as a documentary this movie fails. The effect of the dramatic music while zooming in and out of said documents only adds a smile on my face and never the desired shroud on my back. The information it provides could have been fitted in a 30 min feature. Trying to fill 90 minutes was a bad idea. Others than that, the information it provides is educating, but nothing more than what an educated man would suspect. No scandals uncovered, but a biased not fact based view on the lobbyist culture in Europe. Too often you hear sentences like 'we saw the documents and they reveal the huge influence of industry into politics' - but you do not get shown said documents, there are no citations, only some shots of who send them and who received them. I would not recommend to view this in a class in school as it does not provide enough material and especially not enough facts to discuss it.