Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 515

Film Africa (3): The struggle of the Sahrawi

Guest post by Lindiwe Dovey

Several years ago, I visited Casablanca in Morocco for a few days. What I remember most about that trip is the Hassan II mosque, the largest mosque in the world that non-Muslims are allowed to enter. Perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with a towering, mechanised ceiling that can open to allow the 100,000 people who can’t be accommodated within it to pray beneath the clouds, the mosque is awe-inspiring. 

I had little idea at the time that the person who commissioned that beautiful mosque – King Hassan II, the regent of Morocco from 1961 to 1999 – had been instrumental in another momentous edifice: a 2,000km wall built on his country’s border with Algeria, guarded by 100,000 Moroccan troops and surrounded by 5 million land mines. This wall exists; the king built it in the 1980s because he was terrified that the phosphate-rich, sea-lined land which he had taken from the Sahrawi people – the Western Sahara – was going to be reclaimed by its indigenous inhabitants, most of whom he had forced, since 1975, to live in refugee camps in Algeria.

It took the film, The Problem (2011; trailer above), for me to learn of the plight of the Sahrawi, a dispossessed people whose cause has been recognised by leading human rights organisations. I was so moved by this film that I programmed it at Film Africa last year, where it screened to audiences who seemed to share my dismay that such flagrant abuse of human rights has been going on for so long with so little public awareness globally.

As became clear from this experience, film festivals are one of the most important sites of activism for the Sahrawi cause. This year, we are showing two more films about the Western Sahara issue at Film Africa 2012: the exclusive preview screening of The Runner, followed by a Q&A with the director Saeed T. Farouky. Here’s the trailer:

And the UK premiere of Sons of the Clouds (2012), followed by a Q&A with activist Danielle Smith. This film in fact originated at a film festival itself – the FiSahara film festival; it was while attending this festival in 2008 that Javier Bardem was converted into an activist for the Sahrawi cause and decided to make the film. The trailer:

As all three films show, thousands of Sahrawi have been living in dire conditions in refugee camps in southern Algeria since 1975. The Problem and Sons of the Clouds also reveal the origin of these camps: the Sahrawis’ expulsion from Western Sahara because of the Moroccan ‘Green March’. On 6 November, 1975, Hassan II gathered 300,000 Moroccans to move from the north to the south of the country to take over the Western Sahara, which – as Spain departed – he suddenly announced had always been a southern province of Morocco. The mind-blowing archival footage of the Green March shown in Sons of the Clouds makes it look like a celebration: women and children wave flags; smiling people lean out of car and train windows. As one of the interviewees in Sons of the Clouds says, ‘There were flags, feasts, mechui, couscous … It was amazing.’ But, for the Sahrawi people, it meant the beginning of decades of turmoil. For those who stayed in Morocco-occupied Western Sahara and didn’t flee to Algerian refugee camps, it has been a tenuous existence, with frequent reports from activists of police brutality and even torture.

The beautiful phrase ‘sons of the clouds’ refers to the way the Sahrawi people think of themselves; originally a nomadic people, they followed the clouds through the hot, dry Sahara desert, until they made the Western Sahara home. The sense of freedom this phrase creates contrasts with the brutality and greed of the peoples who have exploited the Sahrawi – the Spanish, who colonized Western Sahara from the late 1800s to 1975, and the Moroccans, colonizers of Western Sahara since 1975. Both nations have no doubt wanted access to Western Sahara’s phosphate deposits (which were first discovered in 1949) and to fishing rights off the coast of the Western Sahara.

What makes Sons of the Clouds and The Runner so interesting as films is that they relate not only the traumatic history of the Sahrawi, but also the process of how individual people become politicized to a cause. The Runner gives us rare insight into, and the view of, a home-grown activist for the Sahrawi cause: athletic champion and freedom fighter Salah Ameidan. Sons of the Clouds, in contrast, is guided by the view of movie star Bardem, who is the producer of, and features in, the film. As Bardem says of his experience at the FiSahara film festival, which is – to my knowledge – the only film festival that takes place in a refugee camp: ‘You live with [the Sahrawi] in their tents, you listen to them … and a very strong sense of injustice fills you.’

I couldn’t watch The Problem, Sons of the Clouds or The Runner without, similarly, being filled with a sense of injustice. And I couldn’t believe that only a handful of people I spoke to knew about this injustice. These may be films – second-hand experiences – but the evidence presented here is completely convincing.

* Lindiwe Dovey is co-director and Film Programming Director of Film Africa, the UK’s largest annual festival of African cinema and culture (starting in November 2012 for 10 days showing 70 African films) in London. Africa is a Country is a media partner of Film Africa. The Runner screens on Mon, 5 November 2012, 8:50pm Hackney Picturehouse and Sons Of the Clouds screens Sat, 10 Nov, 6:50pm at Hackney Picturehouse. You can follow Lindiwe Dovey on Twitter @lindiwedovey.

Donald Trump comes to Kenya

Last week, on “The Tonight Show,” US President Barack Obama joked that his combative relationship with rightwing businessman Donald Trump (who claims Obama wasn’t born in the United States) goes back to their time playing football together in Kenya. In what is not a joke: Trump—well, more a play on his brand of reality show—is now heading to Kenya.  



Uongozi (Swahili for Leadership; the link is to their Facebook page and that’s the trailer above) is an upcoming Kenyan reality TV show that seeks to identify the next generation of young leaders “by challenging the values with which we choose our leaders.” It is sort of like “So you think you can dance” meets Trump’s “The Apprentice.” Uongozi will select 48 “candidates” to face weekly “location and studio-based challenges to test their leadership qualities and skills.” Candidates will be polled and eliminated through viewer text messaging, and the final three will face each other in a presidential-style debate before a mock election. The show’s winner “will receive funding for a social project, a scholarship for an internationally recognized leadership course, and/or the opportunity to meet prominent African/International leaders.”

Uongozi is a crash course on leadership and it has some big donors, among them USAID, UKAID, the Swiss and Japanese embassies in Kenya and other local organizations including The Nation Media Group. But why a television show? According to Uongozi, the show seeks to promote and simulate the healthy democratic discussions about leadership that will deter a repeat of electoral violence in the run up to the 2013 ballot. Again, according to the show’s site:

In the lead up to the 2013 elections, UONGOZI is responding to this need by inspiring and empowering Kenyans to positively engage in the democratic process. The Campaign will embrace the notion of Ni Sisi!—(It is Us!) and up to us, the Kenyan people, to address the nation’s problems, and communicate that elections provide wananchi (citizens) the opportunity to do so by standing for office, carefully considering candidates and voting for competent leaders who campaign on issues of concern to the average Kenyan.

As lofty as the show’s objectives sound, Uongozi is one of many narratives to come out of the post-election violence of December 2007 through February 2008. We’ve previously been told that the problem with Kenyans is that we do not “know” each other. We’ve also been told the root of our troubles is “negative ethnicity”—whatever that means. We have run campaigns to remind ourselves that we are Kenyan first before our various particular ethnicities, not the other way around. These narratives have spawned all sorts of government, private sector, marketing and civil society initiatives. Although this reality TV show presents a new way of running a civic engagement campaign, Uongozi’s narrative is a familiar one: the problem with Kenya is its old guard politicians.

Following Uongozi, what Kenya is missing is good young leaders. The idea here is demystification: once the youth learn how things “really work” politically, then this will lead to progressive action. This notion, of course, runs into several problems, the first of which is that “youth” as a category in Kenyan political discourse means too much and not enough—it calls to mind no legible categories, no definitive age ranges, and, most importantly, no political ideologies. And yet it is clear that young people have historically been marginalized in Kenya, but they lack a forceful social movement in part because the arguments made against their inequity do not galvanize them into a legible community. The discourse regarding youth marginalization usually tends to focus on unemployment and a general condemnation of corruption, both of which are ideologically neutral critiques.

In fact, most of the solutions provided for combating youth marginalization do not present ideologically grounded oppositions. These solutions often take the form of “personal empowerment” or “personal responsibility,” thereby indulging in the fantasy that marginalization is a chosen state which one can will oneself out of. Additionally, the rhetoric of personal responsibility neither questions the role of actors such as the state and the private sector nor critically analyzes the conditions of power that produce marginalization—and therefore does not create much space or momentum for organizing against oppression.

But why spill so much ink over a “political” reality TV show which hasn’t even aired its first episode? Perhaps it will have intrigue—this is Kenya we’re talking about after all. One can only imagine the sort of juicy talking points the “candidates” will let on in the confession booth. On a more serious note, if there is something commendable that can be said about Uongozi even before the show starts, it is that the show holds the potential to buck what has so far been the success of the Kenyan political class: the shutting out of mostly young and progressive people by making politics so unpalatable that these people choose either the private sector or the civil society over and above public service. Perhaps lights, camera, action and people playing themselves—as they do on reality TV—might also play a role in countering youth marginalization, even if we have to turn all of Kenya into The Truman Show.

Weekend Bonus Music Break

I’m taking cues from Africa is a Country’s contributors this week. First up, Boima dropped by Amsterdam’s African Hip-Hop radio’s studio and delivered this set. One of the tracks featured on there is ‘TOHL’ (above) by Togo-born tabi Bonney (real name: Tabiabuè — father: Itadi Bonney), featuring Fat Trel. I don’t believe it was aired on Dutch radio before. Next, Mali-born Abdoulaye Diarra aka Oxmo Puccino (I could have sworn Hinda already featured him in one of the Paris is a Continent posts): 

Etzia is part of the Swedish women’s dancehall reggae movement Femtastic. This is her most recent ‘Same Thing A Gwaan’:

Mikko (he knows his Nordic music) adds: “There’s also the more poptastic Serengeti with their new video, or one of their older ones.”

In ‘Izulu Lelam’ (“heaven is mine”), Cape Town’s Driemanskap family express their trust in a brighter afterlife. This is the first video from their forthcoming second album Hlala Nam:

Then The Weeknd’s saccharine ‘Enemy’ (H/T Dylan) – Abel Tesfaye likes to quote Haile Selassie, but here he channels Morrissey:

Orlando’s piece on Hassan Hajjaj’s work (later reprinted in The Guardian as a wonderful spread) carried a photo of gnawa-player and Electric Jalaba member Simo Lagnawi together with Paris-based Kora-player Boubacar Kafando. Here’s an Electric Jalaba living room gig:

… and another live performance: the new project “Acoustic Africa: Afropean Women” is a collaboration between Côte d’Ivoire singer and percussionist Dobet Gnahoré, Manou Gallo, former Zap Mama bassist, and Cameroonian singer Kareyce Fotso. Siddhartha wrote a feature on them for The Boston Globe this week (they’re performing there). Here they are on stage in Bamako:

Ugochi plugged her latest music video on AIAC’s Facebook wall the other day, calling it “a product of my Naija root and Chicago soul influence”. It takes a while before the actual tune starts:

Football player Vincent Kompany — this is for Sean and Elliot — is getting into the music business. I read in the local (Belgian) press that he has plans to start up a new music label. Belgian-Congolese Coely already got a phone call:

And to wrap up the week: Zambian Zone Fam’s new video, shot in Nairobi. They’re getting big:

That’s it, back on Monday!

Film Africa (2): ‘When China Met Africa’

Bleeding, splintering, RGB pixels paint repeated images of handshakes and embraces — filmed off a television screen, or from existing filmed material — until they expand to a short panorama of the China-Africa Summit held in Beijing in 2006. Rapturously applauding, celebratory faces of powerful men, presidents and heads of state are seen, to a bellowing accompaniment: “…We, the leaders of China and Africa have gathered in Beijing to renew our friendship. Both China and Africa are cradles of human civilisation and lands of great promise. Common destiny and common goals have brought us together. China will remain a close friend, reliable partner and good brother to Africa.”

This does not sound like a concise introduction to one of the longest handshakes in the history of business deals, it instead reverberates around the room like matrimonial rhetoric. The summit, presented as a celebration of their fifty years of diplomatic relations, allowed for the further forging of the Sino-Africa bilateral economic and trade agreements. An exhibition of the oft quoted ‘win-win equation’ — a sterilisation of reality that all players are passionate to uphold, despite its eroding disguise.

By avoiding academic abstractions such as: neo-colonialism, geopolitics and paradigmatic shifts in economic power, the success of Marc and Nick Francis’s latest observational documentary ‘‘, screening at Film Africa in London, unravels by undercutting these heightened contexts. They circumvent the clamor of voices participating in the discussion of China’s co-authorship in Africa, and instead refurbish the story by taking us straight to the ground.

We are plunged three years on from the summit in Zambia and introduced to three of the films protagonists. Separated only by their position in the multi-layered stratums of the Sino-African relationship: Mr Lui, a gaunt, chain smoking, impatient Chinese farmer and entrepreneur; Mr Li, a Chinese project manager for China Henan International Corporation (tasked with overseeing the resurfacing of a 323km road linking Serenje and Mansa); and the jovial Zambian, Trade, Commerce and Industry Minister, Felix Mutati, who always wears a buoyancy, seemingly unencumbered by the significance and gravity of his job. More PR than MP, he wholeheartedly welcomes and facilities any meeting that will propagate investment in Zambia.

The photography is unfiltered, unhampered realism and this recording produces monotonic, muted shades, manufacturing a foreboding listlessness, that soaks into every pixel, as if each scene is veiled. The Francis brothers’ secondary concentration is in the depiction of the ground itself, the soil. Concentrated close up shots peer at the earth united with visceral sounds, as it is brushed, scraped, sliced, sown, ploughed, plumbed and resurfaced. Often low enough to smell, these interluding shots of the voiceless earth, pregnant with resources and opportunities, allows the soil to emerge as the forth protagonist. As it is leached of its monetary value.

There is no commentary, which allows each character to remain in first-person narration. This prompts a series of intimate portrayals and harvests the most insightful, uncensored monologues. While in Mutati’s office during his first introduction to the viewer, he differentiates between West and Eastern business practises, claiming,

When I sit with investors from the Western world they do a PowerPoint presentation about projections, cash-flows, profit, and loss accounts, income statements, balance sheets, risk assessments and all these flamboyant graphs. I’ve never seen those with the Chinese. They probably do them on their own, but when they come here, they just ask me “what are the incentives?” Where is a piece of land, where shall we go and begin work?

At a local market that seems dominated by Chinese chicken farmers, Mr Lui unloads his most unapologetic views on neo liberalism and the free-market that wouldn’t sound peculiar in any financial district wine bar:

Survival of the fittest. The competition is always there, and the weak ones will be weeded out after a while. It’s not a problem. The market is harsh, just like a battlefield. The winner survives.

The entire film has the qualities of a persistent dawn, with a fractured air bringing with it a faint smell of deception, like just gone off milk. It serves to amplify any media report read thereafter, concerning Zambia or any other country in Africa bound in a relationship with the Chinese. Most recently, in August this year, Zambian miners killed a Chinese supervisor and seriously wounded another over a pay dispute at Collum coal mine. With well documented accounts of Chinese-owned mines having increasingly dangerous working conditions, slackness in safety, lack of adequate equipment for workers and lower pay than many other foreign-owned mines. As this film suggests, there is an accumulating suspicion of the Chinese in Africa and the possibility of further manifestations of friction on the ground seems inevitable.

In the concluding shot of the film Mr Lui, stands grandiose and contemplative in his newly acquired land. “After I’m gone, my children will still be here to continue my work. I bought this farm for my children, my three children. In the future, they will hire workers here and continue to work on it.”

* Africa is a Country is a media partner of Film Africa, the UK’s largest annual festival of African cinema and culture (starting in November 2012 for 10 days showing 70 African films) in London. “When China Met Africa” screens Thu, 8 November 2012, 6:30pm The Ritzy.

When Italian politicians threaten to move to Africa

What would you do with old politicians who just won’t give up their seats in the Italian Parliament after too many years of service? Tell them to go to Africa. That’s what people on Twitter and Facebook suggested after Walter Veltroni, the first leader of the center-left Italian Democratic Party, confirmed that he won’t present himself as a candidate in next year’s parliamentary elections for the first time in 19 years. But the idea of travelling to Africa after his political career ends has been brought up by Veltroni himself, when in 2003 he promised during an interview on French TV that “he would leave for Africa with his wife in 2011.”

Veltroni even wrote a book called Maybe God is sick: Diary of an African journey, but so far no journey to Africa has been organized by or for Walter. Yet.

News website Il Post has published a list of Veltroni’s party members who have made a fuss of retiring only to postpone that decision.

But back to the Africa excuse of Italian politicians. Africa is really attractive in different ways to many former Italian politicians. Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy from 1996 to 1998 and from 2006 to 2008, has been appointed as Special Envoy for the Sahel by the UN Secretary-General and he will be sent to Mali to discuss the military intervention by Ecowas (or by a French-led, it depends on the day of the week).

And the same enthusiasm is also found on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Emilio Fede, anchorman of the news programme on Rete 4–a channel owned by Italian tycoon and former premier Silvio Berlusconi–recently revealed his plans: “Next June, when I’ll turn 82, I’ll tear up the contract I have with Mediaset [the network of the Berlusconi family] … I want a better life. And If I didn’t have a family, I would go to Africa.”

The American dream is over. Italian politicians have legitimized the African one.

Film Africa (1): ‘The Beautiful Game’

This documentary film actually turns into a compelling portrait of football on the African continent once you get past the empty platitudes by celebrities at the start, saying little substantive about African football—including former professional footballers (like Anthony Baffoe, Roger Milla and Jay Jay Okocha) and Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and FW de Klerk (the last Apartheid President of South Africa goes on about a childhood love for football).

At times the film feels crowded with too many plot-lines, but director Victor Buhler picked three compelling characters to drive the narrative: Sulley Muntari, a key member of Ghana’s national team (he currently plays for AC Milan in Italy); Emmanuel Boateng, a teenage soccer prodigy also from Ghana, who scores a football scholarship to an exclusive prep school in California; and a Cameroonian footballer abandoned by an unscrupulous agent in Lagos, Nigeria. The supporting cast includes the Dutch coach Clemens Westerhof, who has coached teams in Algeria, Nigeria (to an African Nations Cup championship and World Cup qualification), Zimbabwe and South Africa. Westerhof now lives in Nigeria where he runs a state-supported soccer academy for young men. His insights to his young charges are priceless. In-between there are vignettes about the female fan club of Cote d’Ivoire’s national team (football fan culture in that country deserves a film of its own) and disabled football players and coaches in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, among others. Except for the story of the Cameroonian footballer stuck in Lagos (the scene where he reassures his mother back in Cameroon that success will eventually come, is quite heartbreaking), the film is mostly upbeat. ‘The Beautiful Game’ also has a great soundtrack. ‘The Beautiful Game’ is a contemporary of a slew of other football documentaries produced around the time of the 2010 World Cup, the first time the continent hosted the tournament.

* Africa is a Country is a media partner of Film Africa, the UK’s largest annual festival of African cinema and culture (starting in November 2012 for 10 days showing 70 African films) in London. “The Beautiful Game” screens on November 7 at the Hackney Picturehouse.

Film Africa (1): “The Beautiful Game”

This documentary film actually turns into a compelling portrait of football on the African continent once you get past the empty platitudes by celebrities at the start, saying little substantive about African football—including former professional footballers (like Anthony Baffoe, Roger Milla and Jay Jay Okocha) and Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and FW de Klerk (the last Apartheid President of South Africa goes on about a childhood love for football).

At times the film feels crowded with too many plot-lines, but director Victor Buhler picked three compelling characters to drive the narrative: Sulley Muntari, a key member of Ghana’s national team (he currently plays for AC Milan in Italy); Emmanuel Boateng, a teenage soccer prodigy also from Ghana, who scores a football scholarship to an exclusive prep school in California; and a Cameroonian footballer abandoned by an unscrupulous agent in Lagos, Nigeria. The supporting cast includes the Dutch coach Clemens Westerhof, who has coached teams in Algeria, Nigeria (to an African Nations Cup championship and World Cup qualification), Zimbabwe and South Africa. Westerhof now lives in Nigeria where he runs a state-supported soccer academy for young men. His insights to his young charges are priceless. In-between there are vignettes about the female fan club of Cote d’Ivoire’s national team (football fan culture in that country deserves a film of its own) and disabled football players and coaches in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, among others. Except for the story of the Cameroonian footballer stuck in Lagos (the scene where he reassures his mother back in Cameroon that success will eventually come, is quite heartbreaking), the film is mostly upbeat. “The Beautiful Game” also has a great soundtrack. “The Beautiful Game” is a contemporary of a slew of other football documentaries produced around the time of the 2010 World Cup, the first time the continent hosted the tournament.

* Africa is a Country is a media partner of Film Africa, the UK’s largest annual festival of African cinema and culture (starting in November 2012 for 10 days showing 70 African films) in London. “The Beautiful Game” screens on November 7 at the Hackney Picturehouse.

Film Review: “The Beautiful Game”

This documentary film actually turns into a compelling portrait of football on the African continent once you get past the empty platitudes by celebrities at the start, saying nothing compelling about African football—including former professional footballers (like Anthony Baffoe, Roger Milla and Jay Jay Okocha) and Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and FW de Klerk (the last Apartheid President of South Africa goes on about a childhood love for football).

At times the film feels crowded with too many plot-lines, but director Victor Buhler picked three compelling characters to drive the narrative: Sulley Muntari, a key member of Ghana’s national team (he currently plays for AC Milan in Italy); Emmanuel Boateng, a teenage soccer prodigy also from Ghana, who scores a football scholarship to an exclusive prep school in California; and a Cameroonian footballer abandoned by an unscrupulous agent in Lagos, Nigeria. The supporting cast includes the Dutch coach Clemens Westerhof, who has coached teams in Algeria, Nigeria (to an African Nations Cup championship and World Cup qualification), Zimbabwe and South Africa. Westerhof now lives in Nigeria where he runs a state-supported soccer academy for young men. His insights to his young charges are priceless. In-between there are vignettes about the female fan club of Cote d’Ivoire’s national team (football fan culture in that country deserves a film of its own) and disabled football players and coaches in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, among others. Except for the story of the Cameroonian footballer stuck in Lagos (the scene where he reassures his mother back in Cameroon that success will eventually come, is quite heartbreaking), the film is mostly upbeat. “The Beautiful Game” also has a great soundtrack. “The Beautiful Game” is a contemporary of a slew of other football documentaries produced around the time of the 2010 World Cup, the first time the continent hosted the tournament.

* Africa is a Country is a media partner of Film Africa, the UK’s largest annual festival of African cinema and culture (starting in November 2012 for 10 days showing 70 African films) in London. “The Beautiful Game” screens on November 7 at the Hackney Picturehouse.

There’s an African film festival in Scotland

Africa in Motion, Scotland’s African Film Festival, kicks off in Edinburgh and Glasgow today. Here’s a selection of scheduled films which might as well double as our weekly “10 films to watch out for” series. The festival opens with the debut feature film from South African filmmaker, author and playwright Ndaba ka Ngwane, Uhlanga (“The mark”), set in KwaZulu-Natal:

In Yellow Fever, Ng’endo Mukii explores concepts of skin and race, using a mix of different media and interviews:

From AIM’s “African Films for Children” event: The Pepper Merchant, an episode of the Ethiopian animated children series which follows twins Abeba and Abebe. Below is another example of the many episodes available on the series’ YouTube channel:

Two from the short film competition. Moroccan director Lamia Alami’s Salam Ghourba (“Farewell exile”), a film from 2011, tells the story of Fatima, waiting for a letter from her husband who has migrated to France:

…and Who Killed Me, by Tanzanian director Amil Shivji, a short on the life (and death, I presume) of Hassan, a Congolese immigrant in Canada:

In the festival’s “Arab Spring Documentaries” section, there is Rouge Parole, a work of Elyes Baccar on the uprisings in Tunisia and their aftermath:

Granny’s Flags, a short by Naziha Arebi about Haja Fatma, a mother to eight children, considering freedom in Tripoli during the Libyan Revolution:

Also featuring in the Tripoli Stories series is The Secret Room by Ibrahim Y. Shebani about the caretaker for the National Museum of Libya:

Filed under “African Popular Arts” is Volker Goetze’s The Griot, the musician’s documentary on contemporary West African oral epics (I’ll watch any film which has Mamadou Diouf or Randy Weston as talking heads)…

…and Twende Berlin (“Let’s go to Berlin”), a documentary about Hip Hop group Ukoo Flani’s 2010 visit to Berlin — with some help of Nairobi’s Goethe-Institute project BLNRB (you remember their music videos):

Africa in Motion can also be found on Twitter and Facebook. It runs until 2 November. Full programme of scheduled films and events here. Saturday’s scholarly symposium looks good too.

Is Mads Brügger a journalist?

Even if you like Mads Brügger’s documentaries, chances are you hate him. The characters he plays in his “non-fiction films”—a Communist theater director in The Red Chapel and, more recently, a corrupt diamond smuggler in The Ambassador—are manipulative and brash, pushing his subjects into greater levels of absurdity and maybe even hurting people. But are they revealing some kind of greater truth in the process? 

First the trailer for “The Ambassador”:

Are you a Journalist, an Artist or a Comedian?

My training is in journalism and it’s what I do mostly. A lot of the journalism I’ve done in Denmark is fairly conventional. I’m not running around doing The Ambassador all the time, but I do find it necessary to push the boundaries of what journalism should be or can be. If journalism is to survive and prosper it’s important for journalists to become more sophisticated. At times. Of course there will always be a need for orthodox journalism, but in regards to places where journalists can no longer operate such as the Central African Republic and North Korea I think it’s worth going the extra mile and trying something completely different. While being fully aware of the moral hazards of doing that, because of course there are.

Surely there are ways to report on these places and still adhere to the rules of journalism.

Marshall McLuhan spoke at length about how in a world where people consume as much information as they do, people become very aware of patterns and what is communicated to them. They become very adept at recognizing these patterns which is why people have stopped reading articles and watching the news because they already know what is in it before having read the article or seen the news story because of their ability to recognize patterns. Brügger believes his work contains qualities missing from most conventional journalism. Especially journalism dealing with Africa. I met him at his publicists’ office in New York where I was shocked to see him, not in riding boots and aviators like in The Ambassador but dressed down and earnest.

In that sense, many of the documentaries about North Korea or the suffering of Africa resemble each other to a degree where you can speak about the generic North Korea documentary or the generic Africa documentary. While many of these films are well meaning and well made, people either can’t bear watching them because they are fed up with this “pornography of suffering” or they are simply bored of it—desensitized because they have watched these films too many times.

So if I were to ask somebody “Would you like to see a documentary about the Central African Republic and systemic corruption and neo-colonialism,” many people would say “that sounds nice but I will take a rain check on that one.” If you were to pitch them the idea of The Ambassador: a very white guy becomes an African diplomat to another African country involving himself heavily with blood diamonds and producing matches with pygmies, many people would say “now we’re talking business.”

Just having this conversation with you proves my point because if I had done a very traditional film about the Central African Republic I would probably not be in New York. And the same about North Korea.

In many of the films I have seen about North Korea you have this very dramatic narration and ominous music and hidden camera material which, although interesting, doesn’t say a whole lot about North Korea. But I thought if I went there working as a fake comedy troupe showcasing Danish comedy, something completely different would happen and it would be a much more interesting film.

Conventional documentarians working in poor places often try hard not to perpetuate colonial relationships while they work. Does going there in character, essentially as a racist, mean you’re off the hook?

No, but it means I’m much more honest. Nobody will go to the Central African Republic, deal with the place, and come out without soiled hands, no matter how well meaning, altruistic, or politically correct a filmmaker you are.

I think there’s an honesty in being highly visible. Also, you do encounter a lot of racism there which you hardly hear about here and it is part of the discourse of power in the Central African Republic: black on black racism, tribal racism, racism against the pygmies, black on Chinese racism, black on white and white on black. Many people there are obsessed with race and race matters. But because it’s such a difficult thing to deal with, especially if you’re a filmmaker who is very careful about doing it the right way, it is something that is seldom talked about.

What about the ethics of having regular people in your film who have not consented to be in your film?

I am fully aware that in some regards the ethics in my film, to say it simply, kind of suck. They do.

But what is important for me is that 95 percent of the people in the film, myself included, are crooks. Furthermore, they are men of power who because of their positions and their wealth should be able to fight for themselves. And seen from a Central African Republic perspective I am not picking on the little guys, there are hardly any ordinary Central African Republic people in the film apart from the pygmies.

I read an interview with the director who did Darwin’s Nightmare, a film which had very severe repercussion for the people in it. He said if he had been aware of the consequences, he would never have made it.

For me, no film is worth somebody getting killed, myself included, but if you’re not able to deal with a film having consequences you should not do documentaries because documentaries do have consequences. It is extremely difficult to foresee what this film will cause. There are days when I fear this film will blow up in my face and terrible things will happen, but at the same time I heard a few days ago that because of this film, the media in Liberia have been able to identify eight other “Mr Cortzens” [Brügger's alias in the film] within their diplomatic corps.

Since the film, you have communicated back and forth with Liberian journalists who are trying to uncover corruption. What is your responsibility to Liberians?

Maybe it is easier for someone from the outside to do what I did in Liberia. I know that in the Central African Republic sometime ago they had the dawning of a free and independent press there. An editor of a magazine in Bangui exposed how the European Union gave the president François Bozizé several million euros to pay out as pensions to former CAR soldiers to prevent them from joining the rebels. Instead, he kept all the euros and none of the money went anywhere. That was exposed in the press and then the state came down on the editor and he was thrown in jail, they said for twelve years, for threatening the security of the state. And it was only because of a lot of pressure from outside, from Reporters Without Borders that he was finally released.

In that context if I had gone to Bangui and said I am here to do a documentary on neo-colonial corruption and how dysfunctional a government you have here I would have been on the next flight out. And none of the men in the film would have met with me. That, I think, is journalistically defensible.

In the film you touch on Françafrique. The old colonial relationship that never went away. How does it work?

The real overlords are the French. The French Foreign Legion are there—hidden away but you do see them from time to time. I would say 100 foreign legionnaires could destroy the CAR army within hours. It is one of the few places in the world that France could change the course of history with a couple hundred soldiers.

There are substantial French business and political interests in the Central African Republic. I do believe the head of state security [A Frenchman who’s had his citizenship revoked for mercenary activities who Brügger interviews with a hidden camera] when he says France considers the CAR to be its college fund, its savings.

Do you trust him?

In many ways he is saying what a lot of the NGOs are saying and I think it’s a lot more interesting to hear it from him. A lot of the things he said which I was able to verify with at least two sources, checked out. I’m fully aware of him working for the regime and probably being involved in horrendous activities but it was clear to me that he was an intellectual and he was very much in the know about what was going on. He knew everybody.

When he was assassinated, were you worried about your own safety?

It was clearly a shock that he was killed. It was the first time that somebody who I had a relationship with was killed—a moment that stays with you for a long time. My impression was, as far as I understood it from a diplomat in Bangui, that it was the regime who killed him probably because he was involved in a state coup himself.

At one point in the film, your producer, Eva, has had enough.

That really was her breaking point. That was her snapping. She’s Francophone. I speak broken French. So she could understand all the subtleties and finer details of what Mr Gilbert [a diamond mine owner and politician] was saying and what he was about. She thought of him as the most repulsive human being she had ever met. She hated his guts. Especially when she learned about his child bride in the diamond mine.

What would have been your breaking point? Would you have brought the diamonds back to Denmark?

No, that was one of the few things I decided I would not do before going there. That would be moving into full blown crime. And the consequences of doing that were something I did not want to mess with.

It was as extreme role playing as it gets. Over a really prolonged period of constant paranoia and stress. But what did the trick for me, and maybe this is repulsive to some people, is that I did my best to get some enjoyment from it. And it does have its fun moments being the Liberian consul in Bangui. And I did get to meet and hang out with the most bizarre colorful characters you can imagine. What is so interesting about Bangui is that it is the ultimate hideaway. It is so much off the beaten path and so much off the radar that if you want to disappear, you go to Bangui.

It’s a place that attracts shady and really weird people. Which makes the social scene amongst high society people in Bangui so very interesting. Close to the hotel was a mentally disturbed person living. He was walking around talking to himself and every night at sunset he would go to the river and he would for sometimes half an hour shout to the Congolese fishermen on the other side of the river which is across the border. He would say “please help me fishermen of Congo, I am trapped in a terrible nightmare.”

And I could really identify with him. And I thought what must does say when you are calling to the Congo for help. That is pure desperation. There were also times when I thought maybe he is the only sane person here.

The whole idea of completely becoming someone else was more or less what I was doing. Which also is intoxicating and riveting, really doing a clean slate and being a whole new person.

In The Red Chapel you are halfway there. Was it a conscious decision to kick it up a notch?

Yes it was. And maybe even getting beyond role playing and actually becoming a diamond businessman, a Liberian diplomat. That is very much taking it to the next level.

What is the difference between someone role-playing an evil deed and a person actually doing it?

That is a tricky question. For me you know with The Red Chapel I had a lot of criticism from people saying this is make believe. “You are cheating the North Koreans. How dare you. You are an imposter.”

And I was really fond of the idea that after The Ambassador I could say “yep, I am the consul of Liberia. Whether you like it or not, I am. Where’s the fraud?” But then it becomes complicated if I am the real deal, then I am involved in real morally complicated wrongdoings.

* Aaron Leaf tweets here.