At a key point in The Charcoal People, a brief propaganda piece about Brazilian migrant workers in the Amazon rainforest, a grizzled laborer who's just finished felling a tree pauses briefly to address the camera. With a sigh of resignation and genuine remorse, he candidly laments the fact that it just took him five minutes to lay waste to a 100-year-old piece of timber. Then he turns away and gets back to work. This scene encapsulates director Nigel Noble's two-pronged attack on the steel industry, which leveled an area of rainforest the size of France, paying its massive workforce a pittance for the project. Moving across the withering forest line like nomads, the laborers, though desperately poor and uneducated, are nonetheless keenly aware of their role in deforestation on an almost apocalyptic scale. But their guilty consciences can only give them a moment's pause before they yield to more practical concerns, like putting in enough hours to keep their families alive. Inspired by the pictorial splendor of Robert Flaherty's ethnographic documentaries, The Charcoal People studies the weathered faces and wiry frames of the workers as they go about their daily business, hauling heavy blocks of timber into a row of makeshift kilns. Without comment, save for a few white-on-black titles that underscore his argument with facts, Noble (Voices Of Sarafina!) keeps his camera trained on his subjects and allows their destructive labors to tell the story. The main advantage to this approach is that his simple polemics translate in purely visual terms, culminating in gorgeously composed aerial shots of the ravaged landscape and the receding line of trees. But even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People makes the same points early and often, without any richer portraiture to break from its aimless, repetitive structure. When given the chance to speak, Noble's subjects are remarkably articulate about their insoluble labor crisis and the vicious cycle that allows generation after generation of uneducated migrant workers to follow the same path. With the exception of a powerful sequence showing a little boy slathering wet clay on a kiln for $2 a day, the scenes Noble devotes to them are all too brief, leaving no clear impression of how they operate as families or communities. Though powerful and eye-opening in sections, The Charcoal People seems like a short that was never trimmed down to size, too narrow in vision to deepen into the more coherent, personal exposé the filmmakers intended.