“We Come as Friends” is a new documentary by Hubert Sauper about the conflict for independence for South Sudan, which frees itself from Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir.
Sauper is known for “Darwin’s Nightmare” (2004), about
exploitative fishing of Lake Tanzania.
In the new film, Sauper navigates a prop plane that shoots
astonishing views of the desert landscape before he lands it to deal with the
real people.
The title of the film connotes its substance: Western countries (first Britain, then other
Europeans, and now the Chinese) come to take the land’s natural resources and
hire the people for slave wages, and then the advanced countries partition the
continent into ineffective, dictatorial states. It’s called colonialism.
One of the most striking sequences occurs in the middle as
missionaries from Texas mix with the native people, with a great degree of
personal intimacy, and then brag it has stayed Christian. The wife says (with some crassness) that the landscape reminds her of home in Texas. I am also reminded of a local church film “The
Mission in Belize” about the openness of American visitors to live with the
natives for a while (Drama blog, Nov. 4, 2012).
Often the film mentions Islam and mosques. It constantly shows the squalor in which the
people live, with their communities of conical huts. Darfur is often mentioned but not re-explained in detail. The scenery rather resembles the way Clive Barker describes the desert along the Lenten Way in the Third Dominion of his "Imajica".
The film showed at the AFI in Silver Spring MD and was
followed by a QA. One of the audience members insisted this was about national
liberation, not religion.
The official site is here.
The high definition photography was awesome, giving the film
an Imax look. There is a very small amount of incidental native nudity, including childhood.
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