You don’t have to be a tea drinker to enjoy this warm film from documentary legend Les Blank. The passion and eloquence with which the tea connoisseurs interviewed here talk about the beverage is a delight in itself, a soul-nourishing reminder of what worlds of meaning and experience open up when you really love something. Though a few of these enthusiasts are featured — among them, filmmaker Werner Herzog — it’s mainly centered around David Lee Hoffman, an American importer who swims against the tide of capitalism, mass production, and environmental damage to champion the hand-crafted teas he’s so passionate about. As the film chronicles, however, his insistence on buying directly from the boutique farmers — sometimes traveling hours into the remote Chinese countryside to do so — often puts him at odds with the economic interests of the big-time exporters he must work with.
Hoffman isn’t persistent in the face of all these hurdles for the sake of a buck, though: the film follows his linked efforts to encourage organic farming practices and a direct-from-the-source marketplace that will give the farmers a fair price for their hard work. That his love for the drink also encompasses the artisans who make it and the ground that grows it makes this an inspiring watch.
During the 1990s, David Lee Hoffman searched throughout China for the finest teas. He's a California importer who, as a youth, lived in Asia for years and took tea with the Dali Lama. Hoffman's mission is to find and bring to the U.S. the best hand picked and hand processed tea. This search takes him directly to farms and engages him with Chinese scientists, business people, and government officials: Hoffman wants tea grown organically without a factory, high-yield mentality. By 2004, Hoffman has seen success: there are farmer's collectives selling tea, ways to export "boutique tea" from China, and a growing Chinese appreciation for organic farming's best friend, the earthworm.
A deep dive into the surprising, wonderful world of artisanal tea.
Amongst the aficionados featured in the doc is James Norwood Pratt, whose eloquence and infectious passion for the drink could probably convert any tea-phobe. He describes a good cup of tea as “a kind of living archaeology” for the way it gives us access to the same experience that Queen Victoria or a Chinese emperor might have had, and talks wondrously about the flavor of the drink as being “a taste of the weather of the 10-day lifespan” that the leaves were exposed to before being plucked. Unless you’re a tea fanatic, you’ve probably never thought about the drink in as much detail as Pratt has, but that’s the beauty of this film: it lets us into other people’s passions and opens our eyes to the wonders we might never have seen otherwise.
If you've ever wondered what movie Colin Farrell’s tea-obsessed character was raving about in After Yang, you've found it.
