Movie Review: Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Cold Case Hammarskjöld *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Mads Brügger.

Written by: Mads Brügger.

Featuring: Mads Brügger, Göran Björkdahl.

 

In all seriousness, I have no idea what to make of Mads Brügger or his film Cold Case Hammarskjöld, or how seriously we should take it. I wasn’t a huge fan of Brügger’s The Ambassador (2011), where the Danish journalist disguised himself as a Liberian Ambassador to get close to people in the Blood Diamond trade – although I admired the guts it took Brügger to make the film, as he was placing himself in real danger. He also, I think, may have exploited the very people he was trying to help in ways that made me uncomfortable, even if he exposed some real damning information. He seemed to be trying to pull a Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat, except have it be a real documentary, about real issues, only some of it comic. Cold Case Hammarskjöld is somewhat different, although it shares some of the same DNA. This time, Brügger embarks on a mission to discover if the former head of the UN – Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld was really murdered in the plane crash that killed him in 1961 in Africa, or if, as the official report states, the crash was caused by pilot error. He teams up with Göran Björkdahl, who has been investigating this conspiracy theory for years to try and get to the bottom of it. Even Brügger himself doesn’t seem to know what to make of it – telling us early on that “This could either be the world’s biggest murder mystery or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory”. By the end, you’re still not sure which one is true.

 

Part of that is because no matter how much strange evidence they unearth about Hammarskjöld’s death, none of it really comes close to being conclusive. They have interviews with some of the black witnesses – who weren’t taken seriously at the time because they were black – who seem to suggest another plane shot him done. They even identify the man they think may have flown that plane, and some circumstantial evidence to back it up. Along the way, they become obsessed with Keith Maxwell who headed the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) – and purportedly was involved in the murder, carried out because Hammarskjöld was a believer of giving control of Africa back to the Africans, and away from the colonial powers who exploited the continent for centuries. Maxwell, long dead, gives them a villain – one who dressed all in white all the time according to Brügger. But digging into Maxwell and SAIMR becomes a strange endeavor – they have a hard time proving the organization even existed, let alone did anything. And then they get some breaks – and someone named Alexander Jones, who said he worked for SAIMR in the 1990s, seems to confirm all the crazy conspiracy theories they have heard about SAIMR – including one that said they were involved with trying to give Africans AIDS through an inoculation program in the 1990s – something the end credits tells us would be next to impossible, although who knows if anything actually tried it.

 

These are, of course, deadly serious issues the film raises, and the film takes them seriously, but it can also be quite comic. Throughout the film, we see Brügger in a hotel room in Africa, explaining the story to not one, but two different female African secretaries, who struggle to make sense of all the ins and outs. This does help to try and keep everything in the crazy, knotty plot straight. And is also, as Brügger tells us, because he realized he was making a film about Africa that featured no women, and no black people – he was conducting all his interviews with old, liver spotted, white men. He also does this because after years of research and filming, he realizes he may have nothing that he could actually turn into a film – so he’s trying to salvage something.

 

So how seriously should we take this film, and it revelations? I honestly have no idea. It does kind of feel like a long, insane Reddit post that could, and perhaps should, be rejected as the insane ramblings of an unsound mind. And yet, there is at least some evidence to back up some of the claims – more about Hammarskjöld’s death, which is the subject of multiple ongoing investigations by governments from around the world, and the UN itself, than about the SAIMR itself.

 

What I do know is that this film, as insane as it is, is very entertaining. Brügger is an entertaining presence on film, and he undercuts his own arguments as much as anyone else does. You cannot really claim he is a crazy conspiracy theorist, because he doesn’t just reject the evidence that doesn’t fit his theory, and he lets you know from the starts that perhaps you cannot believe any of it. And even if the specifics of what he says sounds insane – the overall premise, that powerful interests wanted to continue to exploit Africa, and still are exploiting Africa, is pretty much undeniable. In that world – which is our world – than everything he says actually sounds plausible – no matter how insane it all feels.