This movie literally changed my life. It cured the common cold and anthrax, in case you didn't know this already. When David puts his face into those sacks, my God was it beautiful. I put my face in sacks almost daily now. I've created a shrine to this movie in my closet, complete with a bubble gum figurine of David Lee Hoffman with a wig made out of discarded tea leaves. I recommend you all do the same so that the tea fairies don't come steal your soul in the middle of the night. I am giving you a fair warning, my soul was almost stolen by these creatures until I realized what they wanted. Regardless of this small inconvenience, the movie is worth seeing and I would have built the shrine even if my hand wasn't forced.

Obviously tea is central to this documentary. What is on screen is a guy looking for "real" tea to import to the USA and encounters with locals, etc. This film documents a quest! A Bang your Head against the Wall quest of a mission to get people (that includes the USA as well as the Chinese) to wake up and recognize what is being lost to the god of efficiency and profits. Along the way, we can almost smell the 500 year old tea bushes on the dirty, foggy mountain slopes that are getting pummeled by progress. We see firsthand what it takes to get a Chinese trained bureaucrat to think (actually think! - he visually strains) about what he is trying to push upon the Yankee peddler. Yes, Hoffman is a bit much but that is what makes a good story, right? Enjoy every minute of this quest to the final frame (hope someone appreciated the ending like I did). Oh, and the music is worthy of a soundtrack CD.

I'm a tea drinker: always have been, always will be. So I was quite disappointed with this film, which is focused very narrowly on a Marin County tea maniac and his efforts to establish a wholesale business that will also help independent Chinese farmers maintain a sustainable, pesticide free industry. That's all well and good, but the lecturing, hectoring tone of ugly American tea evangelist David Lee Hoffman is tiresome and vaguely offensive. Hoffman seems to be a self-taught expert: he lived in Asia for a decade (without, apparently, bothering to learn any local languages) but doesn't seem to have any formal training in the science or art of tea growing. He's a tea pornographer: he sticks his nose in a bag of tea leaves and knows good tea when he smells it. Fellow tea drinker James Norwood Pratt is even more enthusiastic: he actually thinks that, by drinking a cuppa, we can replicate and share the experiences of Queen Victoria. There's surely a decent tea documentary to be made, but unfortunately, this isn't it.

I saw this film in Austin, Texas accompanied by five distinct varieties of teas to drink, most actually coming from the Hoffman estate. Before seeing this film, drinking those teas would have meant little to me. But after seeing the film and learning about the tea making process, from plant to package, I became more aware of the effort it takes to enjoy a quality tea. Les follows tea exporter David Hoffman around China as he talks to everybody, from politicians and businessmen down to the farmers about buying good quality organic tea. The term organic, says Hoffman, is a recent term. Seventy five years ago, all tea was organic. Before chemical fertilizers were touted as the solution to the mass production of tea, centuries old methods of tea growing was the only way of production. Today, Hoffman battles Chinese bureaucracy and stubbornness to sway the government away from vast modernization and to buy traditional tea directly from the farmer for a good price. The battle is long and hard and filled with potholes and bumpy roads. China believes that the chemical fertilizers will increase production and exports. Hoffman argues that the farmers won't even drink the teas grown with chemical fertilizers. The teas I drank from the Hoffman estate were exquisite. Much better than any Lipton or Bigelow tea. After seeing this film I can rest assured that I won't be poisoning myself anymore with chemically grown teas. I now know what to look for, thanks to Les.