A documentary produced and directed by Irish film-makers Ann McElhinney and her husband, Phelim McAleer, is being compared with the work of controversial director Michael Moore.
The European premiere of McElhinney and McAleer's Mine Your Own Business takes place tonight in London. It exposes what the couple call "the dark side of environmentalism" - the conflict between communities forced to live in poverty and environmental campaigners who drive away corporations that could provide mining jobs.
The Wall Street Journal commented that the film means that Fahrenheit 9/11 maker Michael Moore now has competition in the art of political film-making.
The trailer for the documentary has become a surprise success on the internet, attracting more than 1,100 hits a day on the YouTube website.
The documentary is being promoted by the New York-based Moving Pictures Institute, which has organised a 15-campus tour of US universities to bring the documentary to college students.
In the film, Omagh native Phelim McAleer reveals what he says is the real agenda of many global environmental activists, and shows how their campaigns in remote areas are often motivated by a desire to preserve poverty-stricken villages they view as "quaint".
He starts his journey in a Romanian mining village, where foreign environmental activists opposing the construction of a high-tech gold mine insist that the villagers don't want prosperity but prefer the simple peasant life where they are "poor but happy". But the villagers tell a different story as they speak about their desire for development that would bring renewed prosperity and clean up the hundreds of years of environmentally unfriendly mining projects.
McAleer said: "It seems that the new threat to miners, their families and the wider communities is not from cigar-sucking, champagne-swilling robber barons. Instead, the biggest threat to impoverished mining communities comes from environmentalists desperately trying to stop economic growth they have enjoyed in their home countries."
Before directing Mine Your Own Business, McAleer and McElhinney co-produced The Search for Tristan's Mum, an hour-long documentary shot in Indonesia and broadcast on RTÉ in September 2005.
It was inspired by a news story McElhinney broke when she revealed that an Irishman had adopted Tristan Dowse as a baby in Jakarta, but had abandoned him two years later when his wife became pregnant.