A twice-weekly sharing of eco-shwag.

Today’s giveaway is a DVD copy of From the Ground Up, a film by Su Friedrich that follows an ordinary cup of coffee from Guatemala to South Carolina to a coffee cart in New York City.

Like Black Gold, From the Ground Up shows the need for fair trade in coffee. However, the two films have extremely different feels. From the Ground Up is a very quiet film that primarily just shows various people in the coffee trade chain doing their work. Sometimes, the film’s rather too quiet and slow moving — with a low production quality and monotonous score. I can see why Black Gold — with its pretty scenes and dramatic moments — makes for a much more successful film for a wider release.

Still, if you’ve been curious about how exactly coffee makes its way from faraway farms to coffee shops, you’ll get an inside look at all the steps in From the Ground Up. We see the coffee workers with children in tow, hauling heavy sacks of coffee beans they just harvested — then waiting around for the supervisor to record their work. We see coffee commodity traders, watching their computer screens, calling in trades. And in New York, we see the coffee cart workers, scrubbing down their coffee carts and getting out to the streets before the sun even comes up, ready to put in a very long day’s work. In between there’s coffee pulping, drying, sorting, bagging, tasting, slurping, selling, trucking, and many more intermediary steps.

Want to see the film for yourself? You can buy the film for $24.95 — or comment or email by Tuesday to get into the drawing, which’ll happen Wednesday (more info on freebies here). US addresses only.

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