The Ambassador is the highly entertaining new documentary from Danish filmmaker and satirist Mads Brugger. In 2007, Brugger discovered an online website that offered diplomatic posts in third world countries – for a price.
In The Ambassador, Brugger creates an alter ego named Mads Cortzen, an eccentric wealthy Danish businessman with aspirations to make a difference in Africa by setting up a match making factory. He applies to become the Liberian Consul in the Central African Republic, and head to Africa to fulfill his dream.
Of course his real intentions are quite different. Smuggling blood diamonds and hanging out with pygmies are also on his To Do list.
The result is, well quite frankly, unbelievable. Dressed as a dapper clichéd colonial adventurer, Brugger discovers a country forgotten by the rest of the world where corruption is rife, life is hellish and anything can happen. And it does.
Brugger is visiting New Zealand as part of the NZIFF, and I had the pleasure of chatting to him about the making of his documentary.
Where did this idea come from?
In 2007 I found this diplomatic brokerage website on the internet by chance, I was just browsing around, and I thought if it’s really possible to buy a diplomatic title for real that would be a very interesting starting point for a documentary because it would bring me beyond role playing. [Brugger’s last film The Red Chapel saw him covertly enter North Korea pretending to be a communist theatre director]
And it would grant me access to a very secretive and closed world you know, which is the world of state affairs in an African state. I would get to meet all the kingpins and power brokers that you usually never get to see because they are impossible to meet, it’s impossible to film them and so on. And I also liked that at the end of the day, whether you liked the film or not, you would have to agree that after all he is the General Consul of Liberia to the Central African Republic which is a very unique facet of the film?
Are you still the Consul from Liberia to the Central African Republic?
I believe so, yes, I haven’t been told otherwise!
So why did you chose the former French colony, the Central African Republic?
It is the most unknown African country, the most forgotten African country and once I had the idea for the film, for the method, I knew I wanted to make the film in Africa. I met with this famous Danish Africa journalist whom we call Congo Peter [Peter Tygesen], he wrote a brilliant book about the Congo and I told him about my idea because I wanted to pick his brain, about my idea and what kind of Africa I was interested in. Of course I was interested in the extreme kind of Africa. And I asked him, “Where would you make a film like this?” And immediately he said, “the Central African Republic”. At that point I have never heard about the CAR. Actually a diplomat in Bangui, the capital [of CAR], told me that when Aristide was ousted from Haiti, the French and the Americans made a deal that the Americans should fly him to the CAR, and while the plane is on the runway in Port-au-Prince, the pilot had to call the US State Department, and ask them, “Is there really a country called the Central African Republic?” as like many people, he’d never heard about it.
It’s a fascinating place, but it feels like it’s lost in another time. Does it exist in the 21st Century?
The first time I visited in 2008, they were celebrating the opening of the first ATM machine. So in many ways it is still very much the 1970’s.
And did that appeal to you?
Yes, very much so, because on an aesthetical level I am very attracted to that period of time in African history.
In some ways it [CAR] hasn’t even left the 18th century. I met several diplomats in Bangui who told me that they believed that within the next fifteen or twenty years the country will basically dissolve, it will cease to exist. You could even argue that as of now it is a piece of fiction because they are not even able to uphold their own sovereignty. And given the fact the regime is basically a criminal racket. It doesn’t make sense to think of the country as a country really, so it is more of a place of fantasy and fiction, which is also why I am attracted to it.
So how much of this idea, this storyline could you prepare before you set foot there?
Well, the way I work there’s a lot of situation-ism in it, I work with situations and there’s also a lot of game strategy. so when I went there in 2008, to get a feeling of the territory, I discovered that you know, more or less all kinds of production had ceased to operate because of corruption basically, all the multi-nationals had pulled out except the French. Partly also because the French had made the government tell the non-French multi-nationals to leave the scene – the world’s biggest diamond cartel, De Beers, were given 24 hours to leave the CAR - and I discovered that basic necessities like matches they weren’t even able to produce, so I thought why not try to set up a match factory because it’s so simple and basic.
So I had that idea that I wanted to do matches as my official cover, and of course from doing research about cases of diplomats being involved with criminal activities I became aware of the fact that diplomats were heavily involved with dealing with diamonds in the CAR, so I had the idea that would be my unofficial agenda, so these things I could plan and prepare, but the rest is really a thing about rolling with the blows and going along with whatever happens. I also knew that I would have pygmies in the film on a psycho-infantile level….I thought it would be a very interesting feature to work with, to have pygmies in the film.
Did they live up to your expectations?
In many ways, yes, but what was so terrible and difficult to deal with, was that the pygmies I met with were severely damaged from binge drinking, because the Minister who was in charge of them basically, it was my impression it was his own personal pygmy tribe, was pouring so much alcohol on them so that was not easy to deal with.
There are delightfully wicked moments in this film – your speeches you deliver as a diplomat are wonderfully terrible, there are bad taste Hitler jokes, and then there’s the scene where you play whale sounds to the pygmies. Is this all part of your genius? Are these moments all spontaneous or is there quite a lot of thought that goes into the humour?
The whale singing was because…umm…at that period of time I wasn’t as coherent a human being as I would have liked to have been, and Paul [assistant], we were discussing about how my pygmy assistants were doing and I don’t know why it came up, but he told me they had never heard about whales, they had no knowledge of the concept of a whale, and I thought, by chance I had some sound material of hump back whales singing with me, and I thought why not play it and see what happens….which is why we made the scene, so, yeah.
You have this clever balance between gravitas and humour throughout the film, did you leave anything on the cutting room floor that went too far one way or the other?
I tried to take the whale scene out of the film, just to see how it would be without it. It was because being a journalist, journalists are always told about killing your darlings and taking out what is not necessary, and it’s a non-logical scene, but I really missed it once I had taken it out. But that was the only thing which I was not sure about having in the film.
We did shoot some scenes where I went to a nightclub for diplomats in Bangui called Zodiac, but there you will also meet a lot of extremely beautiful local women, but once I realized the hardship that these women have to deal with and that this is beyond prostitution, it’s a matter of just having a chance to sleep in a decent made bed, or getting away from the hellish ordeal of surviving in Bangui for a night or a weekend, or ultimately finding a man who could bring you out of the CAR and once you realize the sadness in that you also realize that it would be too much having these women in the film.
You were aware that you wanted to take a look at the continuous foreign intervention in Africa, the blood diamond industry, and the country itself was corruption, but beyond that you also present other revelations about connections to the Middle East, China and reveal a general racism that exists there. Much of this you obviously researched, but was there anything that shocked or surprised you?
Yes, lots of things. For instance I had no prior knowledge that Indian Consul also had worked on making a match factory!
Also meeting the Head of the State Security and basically most of the things he conveyed to me was.
What the French are doing and have been doing in their former African Colonies is really terrifying and it’s a mystery to me as to why they have been able to get away with it. Just the role they played in the Rwandan genocide is horrible, but because it is Africa and far away from Europe people don’t care about it. But it’s one of the remaining places in the world where you can change history with approximately 400 soldiers, which is why France has a lot of power there. Also because a language is really a dialect with an army. In Bangui there are a small detachment of French Foreign Legions soldiers permanently based in Bangui, hidden away, approximately 3 or 400 hundred. I was at the nightclub one night when they had their land leave and it was like this outlaw biker club from hell had been flown to town, and you could really feel how terrified and scared these Africans felt about these killing machines which they really are, and once you experience this, you realize how much power the French have in that region. And all the things the other diplomats told me about how the French operate there and manipulate and control all the machinery of power is really scary and unpleasantly surprising.
Did you have to do much background prep to convince the Diplomatic Agencies selling diplomatic titles you were a genuine person? If they had googled you – would they have found this Mads Cortzen character?
I used my father’s name, Cortzen, and of course if you google that name now you will eventually find out about who I am, but I was really terrified of them really looking into me. I think in theory they should be able to, but apparently they didn’t. I made a resume, I wasn’t deliberately lying, I was being economical with the truth and I tried to portray myself as this eccentric Scandinavian media entrepreneur looking for a second career in Africa, more or less. And was able to pull it off. And of course if you have money and signal you do have money, people stop being critical about who you are.
The film was shot mostly on hidden cameras, where was your favourite hiding place?
Most of the film was shot on this small Canon EO5 camera, which looks like a still camera but which shoots high grade video, and we told the Africans that the photographer was my Press Officer because in Africa, everything that you can attach “officer” to is swanky. And we had this very nice book, like in a cartoon really, where we made room inside the book for the camera, but most of the film was shot on the camera out in the open. The Africans didn’t care really.
Don’t miss The Ambassador or Mads Brugger at the New Zealand International Film Festival.
Enjoy.