Article & Journal Resources

Documentary. Directed by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht. (Not rated. 70 minutes. Opening today at the Roxie in San Francisco and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Starts Sunday at the Cerrito Theater in El Cerrito.)

If you walked into the middle of Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht's exquisite little documentary and saw Marin's David Lee Hoffman bending forward to inhale the aroma of the green leaves piled in his cupped hands, you could be forgiven for thinking this is a film about weed. But, clearly, these green leaves are much more addictive than marijuana, and, in some cases, much more expensive as well.

"All in This Tea" is a short film, but it's packed as tightly as a brick of the aged black tea called pu-erh that tea connoisseurs prize and store for years in special cellars, like the one Hoffman maintains on his property. Years ago, political turmoil in the Untied States sent Hoffman packing off to Asia, where he lived for a decade or more, met the Dalai Lama and acquired an informed taste for rare, handmade teas. He began to seek out the best of them in China and Tibet, along the way gaining the ability to stick his nose into a bag of the stuff and know in an instant if it was grown with chemical fertilizers or if it was picked correctly or, in some cases, what part of the mountain it was from. He started bringing the tea back to the United States for friends, which, in turn, led to the creation of his own tea import business, which he has since sold.

For centuries, Chinese farmers grew and harvested fine teas. Green tea leaves are picked by hand in the morning, spread out through the day to wilt in the sun, then processed in woks to "kill the green," which means the farmers sifted, rolled and rubbed the leaves to bruise them and bring out their full flavor and aroma. Once China became Communist, though, the emphasis was on quantity, which meant the introduction of chemical fertilizers that not only impaired the flavor of the tea but, over time, virtually killed the soil, whose qualities help define the individual character of the tea itself.

During his many trips to China, Hoffman's first challenge was finding the best teas. A much bigger challenge at first was cutting through the government red tape (pun intended) to get the tea out of China.

The film is both delightful and informative at every turn. We see Hoffman trying to explain to Chinese officials the value of earthworms to growing soil and finding that the word "poop" doesn't translate easily. We learn that most of the black tea the world is used to comes from the Assam area of India and that its discovery, growing on a Himalayan hillside, broke the long Chinese monopoly on tea. And we learn that while the United States may be a Starbucks nation, coffee drinking is actually decreasing while tea drinking is on the rise, in part because of its health benefits.

Blank, whose previous films include "Burden of Dreams," which won a British Academy Award in 1982, and Leibrecht, who has collaborated with Blank for nearly 10 years, have done a masterful job of assembling this film. Of course, it brims with fascinating information about the process of growing fine tea, but the film rises to perfection as the tea becomes a kind of lens for us to consider, yet again, the fragility of our environment. It's encouraging to be told that, despite the environmental damage caused by years of chemical fertilizers, China's boutique tea industry is thriving again, and that includes the making of organic teas as well.

- David Wiegand
'Protagonist'