Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Mads Brügger, Göran Björkdahl
Intro:
… important elements are addressed as a bit of an afterthought and yet they are the moral heart of the story.
There’s a corner (actually a very large corner) of the internet that specialises in circulating conspiracy theories. Its enduring appeal is guaranteed by the fact that there is too much to know for certain, coupled with an idea that the powerful are up to no good and have a vested interest in hiding things and spreading misinformation.
Mads Brügger is a Danish documentarian who is fascinated by the strange case of the not-well-explained death of a UN Secretary General in the 1960s. The diplomat in question was named Dag Hammarskjöld. In 1961, he was flying in a small plane to a meeting in the Congo. Then his plane crashed, and he died at the site. These bare facts are not contested.
However, whether it was an accident, the exact way in which the plane was downed, and the possible perpetrators (if it wasn’t an accident) are still a matter of speculation.
Brügger (whose name is unintentionally close to ‘mad bugger’) and his buddy set about trying to piece together the various missing elements of the story.
Calling it a ‘cold case’ is obviously an attempt to give it a crime caper gloss. In fact, it is a very cold case, as it all happened so long ago that even the people who may have been involved at the time, or who knew something about it, are either dead themselves or not able to recall things. Brügger and his friend say at one point that they have been following the case for about six years. That itself seems a bit odd, but then they do not hide the fact that they are eccentric obsessives.
Also, most of the facts that they uncover could have been assembled quite quickly and they could have been relayed in a shorter form than the two hours it takes here. The other factor is that the revelation that there might have been involvement in the crash from a semi-secret South African mercenary organisation (no further spoilers), is not at all new either. This idea came to light, as the film fully acknowledges, during Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] in 1998. Footage of the TRC is interesting and we could have done with more of that and less of Brügger riding around in cabs or interviewing slightly dull interviewees. The filmmaker also employs the device of dictating his musings in a hotel room to a young African woman scribe/secretary. In fact, there are two such women, but precisely why this is the case is never really explained.
Then there are the political and historical aspects of the matter. It would have been more satisfying if they had been foregrounded and this would have bolstered the film’s interest and relevance. These important elements are addressed as a bit of an afterthought and yet they are the moral heart of the story.
Hammarskjöld was uncharismatic but an honourable UN leader, and in many ways, he was ahead of his time. He was the only UN Secretary General to be awarded the Nobel peace Prize posthumously. In particular, he was prescient in seeing back then that the Western nations and their big companies would plunder the rich mineral resources lying under the soil of newly independent African nations (like the Congo).
As the film argues, if he had succeeded in his mission to rein in that colonial arrogance and greed, then many parts of Sun Saharan Africa could have developed much more quickly and successfully. That much does give one pause.
