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.

DVD Review: The Ambassador

The Ambassador

Directed by: Mads Brugger.

Mads Brugger was certainly brave – or foolhardy – when he made The Ambassador. His goal was to show the corruption that is rife in Africa – how government diplomatic credentials can be bought and sold for the right price, how these fake diplomats head into Africa saying good things about building infrastructure and factories to help the poor, which is really no more than a ruse to get their hands on blood diamonds – mined by children, exploited by rich miners – and then how these diplomats are able to smuggle these blood diamonds out – because of their diplomatic credentials, they are never searched. And Brugger does all that. This Danish journalist disguises himself as the most outrageously clothed diplomat you can imagine – it’s like he shops at Imperialists R Us or something – and then films everyone on hidden cameras – or sometimes even video cameras that he ensures his guests are just still cameras – boldly incriminating themselves just minutes after meeting him. There is no shame here, no secrecy. Everyone knows what is happening, and no one does anything to stop it.

So why, if Brugger does what he sets out to do in exposing the corruption, was I so uncomfortable while watching The Ambassador? It wasn’t just the behavior of the corrupt that gave that feeling – that’s to be expected. But it was also Brugger’s behavior. His ruse, that all diplomats have because they need a legitimate reason to be there, is that he’s going to set up a match factory where the poor will work. He hires an expert from India, and even holds training sessions with the pygmies, who he insists on hiring, because, in his words, the Africans think they have magical powers. He even hires two pygmy assistants to follow him around, and delights in dancing with them. He makes up racist posters, saying that all the Africans problems are caused by the French and the Chinese. He shows them videos to this effect. He acknowledges in his voice over that he is giving these people a false sense of hope, but justifies it by saying that it goes on, on a much larger scale, every day. But that doesn’t justify it. He takes the phony match factory idea to illogical extremes – way farther than he needs to in order to expose the corruption and get the blood diamonds he needs.

I was also confused by his behavior often in the movie – the racist jokes and speeches he makes almost constantly. I know he’s trying to poke fun at the phony diplomats, who are clueless and racist, as well as the corrupt African officials themselves – trying to prod them into saying something. But more often than not, I got the feeling that this entire movie was really just a way for Brugger to amuse himself. It’s like he’s trying to do what Sacha Baron Cohen did in Borat or Bruno – the difference of course, is rather than rubbing Middle America’s nose in their own racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, Brugger exploits the very people who are exploited all the time, and the supposed purpose of this documentary is to expose that exploitation. Even Baron Cohen – a genius at this type of film - takes his gambit too far at times, and gets into some shady ethical territory. Brugger goes far beyond that in The Ambassador.

It should be said that Brugger did take real risks during the making of this film. The people he deals with are not screwing around, and have no problem with killing people and leaving them a ditch – in fact by the time Brugger is done filming in Africa, one of the people he interviewed had already been assassinated. It took guts for Brugger to do what he does in this film. And he does expose real corruption. That doesn’t excuse some of his behavior, or make me like the movie all that much more, but I do feel it’s right to give credit where credit’s due. I don’t like The Ambassador, but I admire the guts it took to make it.