SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: There seems to be only two kinds of black Africans in this fascinating but frustrating documentary about the impact on one family of white farmers of Zimbabwe President Mugabe’s notorious land 're-form’ policy.
There are the 'bad guys’ those black men and women who wield sticks and look fierce; we often see them from afar – shot unsteadily and in secret (for Zimbabwe has a complete media ban) – often from a moving vehicle. This material, perhaps unconsciously, has the look and feel of war-zone media. It's scary precisely because the men and women behind the violence seem here to be less than human.
This stuff is juxtaposed with another kind of black African figure in the film; the grateful and dutiful farm worker. Directors Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson often cut to footage of white farmers hugging and holding their black employees. Black and white comfort one another. These intensely moving vignettes illustrate the enormous gulf between white western political rhetoric and a work a day cultural reality in a African nation where a 19th century Victorian style of colonial paternalism seems to have a lasting social value (such scenes are what the BBC primly observes as 'unsettling’ for non-Africans). At its base, Mugabe is a movie about racism but its style (boldly partisan) and approach (doggedly emotional) throws up a mess of questions that go left unanswered.
It’s often said of documentaries that they hold two stories – one running in parallel and underneath the movie we actually get to see. This is, of course a reference to the fact that filmmakers have two kinds of relationships with their film subjects – one played out behind the camera and one on screen. And here, Bailey and Thompson, a British filmmaking couple with a production background in African on projects turned out by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, maintain that their main characters are heroes.
The white African of the title is Michael Campbell, a 75-year-old man whose enormous fruit farm near Harare is a target for Mugabe’s policy of confiscating land owned by whites. According to the BBC, 4,400 white farmers held a third of Zimbabwe’s land before 2000. The stated intention behind Mugabe’s edict was to return land to black Africans as a way of re-distributing the countries wealth to the less fortunate; it was also a political statement since white farmers forcibly removed blacks from the land early in the 20th century.
The film follows Campbell and his son in law Ben Freeth in their 2008 court battle to save the farm. Their case is simple; they want to argue before the South African Development Community in Namibia that Mugabe has targeted the Campbell’s land because they are white.
The stakes are huge for these people. Under Mugabe’s plan, white farmers can be removed from their land; and all their property confiscated. This means the farm workers – often hundreds of them on each holding – and from what is shown in the film, 100% black African – have no means of support. Not only that, there is talk in the film that having worked for whites, this will prejudice future opportunities for the black worker and in fact make them a target for retaliatory violence.
As Bailey and Thompson follow the case (there were 74 other farmers who joined them), the supposed idealism of Zimbabwe’s dictator is revealed as a portal for cronyism; the Campbell’s farm was given to Mugabe’s secretary of information Nathan Shamuyarira and an audit of the confiscated properties up until the hearing revealed that this kind of corrupt rorting was typical.
Campbell and Freeth argue out much of these facts on camera, which gives the movie an intimacy as well as a disquieting feeling; at times it's like watching a naïve home movie made to impress rellies of an argument, where its merits seem irrefutable and all its subtlety drained away.
Even as the film turns grim – the court case is a series of stalling actions by Mugabe’s lawyers, while back home the Campbell’s are attacked and tortured by thugs in an effort to compel them to drop the case – Bailey and Thompson’s insular style of filmmaking fails to open up a space where we can negotiate the movies torrent of emotion and politics in a way that is complex and rich. For instance, the Campbell farm workers are merely figures not characters; we find out nothing of how they live, what they are paid, or any sense of their day to day experience. The perpetrators of the violence are equally opaque. Are they hired thugs or are they a cultural force, motivated by their own loss and (perhaps) manipulated by government?
The film doesn’t present anything other than a narrow portrait of its broader characters. Of course none of this is to suggest that the Campbell’s have not been victimised; it’s just that Bailey and Thompson have turned out a gut thumping film of great power. But I can’t help thinking that a style, measured, calm and cold would have been more revealing and more troubling.
