A visitor drops from the sky, almost as if an alien. Only he’s not like the usual visitors who want your land, minerals, and oil.
Pressed as to whether he’s Muslim or Christian — this is Sudan, before the 2011 referendum on partitioning the country — he politely tries to deflect the question with a joke. No one takes him seriously anyway: He arrived in homebuilt aircraft that barely looks flightworthy, and he wears a pilot’s uniform that reeks of the thrift shop.
Who is this cheeky impostor?
Hubert Sauper earned an Oscar nomination for his prior Africa doc, “Darwin’s Nightmare” (seen here in 2006), about the ruination of Lake Victoria and lingering colonization of Tanzania. (That government later sued him for his temerity.)
An Austrian based in France, he then built his Lindbergh-level puddle-jumper — dubbed “Sputnik” — and spent two years reporting this even better new film. His tone is wry outrage, with his sarcasm kept more in check. One of the great strengths of “Darwin’s Nightmare” was Sauper’s willingness to let the locals speak for themselves about geopolitics, war, and resource extraction by the West. Here, after a few introductory musings from the air — one thinks of Herzog’s “Lessons of Darkness” — he mostly drops out of the conversation.
For their protection, his Sudanese subjects are unnamed (though one wishes for maps to help track the various tribes and regions). “Now all the land is taken by the oil companies,” says a rueful village elder.
This film is a grim travelogue in which Sauper’s interviewees seem to let their guards down because he and his plane are so ridiculous. (The goofy gyrocopter and wasteland of “The Road Warrior” come to mind.) He meets smiling Chinese petro-engineers in the Muslim north and Texan missionaries in the Christian south; visits a British mine-disposal expert; watches at the periphery of a George Clooney media scrum; takes a friendly UN official up in his plane; and attends an economic-development conference in Juba, capitol of the new South Sudan, where cheerful arms merchants vend their wares.
All these outsiders are unfailingly polite, secure in their belief that they’re doing good. Only the Chinese are truly candid with their comical guest. When he asks about the dumps and despoliation outside the drilling base, he’s told, “Environmental protection is their responsibility” — meaning the penniless, powerless locals. The Koch brothers would surely agree.
Light on its feet yet dead-serious in tone, this excellent doc alternates micro to macro, ground to air. One moment Sauper’s listening to displaced villagers (in the south) complaining about being forced to live in a graveyard, the next his aerial camera collects abstract images of rippling desert and lambent sky bisected by flamingo flocks; or of mud-walled villages reading like chessboards on the arid plain; or of the bulging brown hog’s-back of the Nile, leading from Lake Victoria to even more trouble in the Arab north. Patterns of corruption and theft repeat across centuries, and the victims are always the same in this very calm, infuriating documentary.
Sauper has said he’s planning a trilogy of films about Africa and its neo-colonial woes, but I wish he’d bring his friendly little plane over here. When it comes to stark inequality and stateless mercenary capital, the colonial model of 19th-century Africa is now being applied to us all.
“We Come As Friends”
Rating: Not rated
Showing: SIFF Film Center
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