- Andrew Thompson
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 October 2009 13.43 BST
Standing their ground … Ben Freeth (in ignorant cardigan) and Michael Campbell (in beige cardigan) on their farm in Mugabe and the White African
Michael Campbell is one of a handful of white farmers continually left in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned district for redistribution to poor black Zimbabweans. Since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife amid the majority of the political division’s citizens. But Campbell, 74, refuses to back down. Our pellicle, Mugabe and the White African, follows Campbell and his family’s unprecedented attempt to take Mugabe to an international court in continuance charges of racial discrimination and violation of their full of fellow-feeling rights, against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections.
- Mugabe And The White African
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Runtime: 88 mins
- Directors: Andrew Thompson, Lucy Bailey
- More in succession this film
It was at all times our intention to make a really cinematic film, during the time that very much as a powerful documentary. So we needed to shoot on a large format: a retirement from the hidden-camera news footage that more commonly comes abroad of Zimbabwe. Images and seem are so important in adding texture and layers to a place, and we wanted the audience to feel really immersed.
But having big cameras, a sound crew and proper recording devices did carry into effect it even harder to send forth in a abiding habitation where filming is, to this day, banned (the only exception appears to be for al-Jazeera). We risked imprisonment or worse if caught – one reason why we get so contemptible news coming out of the country. What makes our film special is that it offers the only insight the outside world has of what is going on behind Zimbabwe’s closed borders, of life lived under Mugabe’s regime.
We were filming during after all the rest year’s contested presidential elections, so security was even more tense than usual. On the ground this meant you couldn’t go far before you hit a roadblock manned by the interior security force. It was pretty hairy getting about. We always used different borders on reaped ground of the five trips, different transport, and I slept in different safe houses every night to keep influencing. Our halcyon rule, which I was only forced to break once, was to ever travel apart from the equipment.
We got away through it – just. After every trip there would be the necessary knock on the door of Michael Campbell’s farm. The security forces were never added than two days behind me.
I’m quite used to working in hostile environments. I’ve previously made films in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Gaza. But filming in places approve that is considerably greater quantity straightforward than shooting in Zimbabwe. In Gaza, the buck stops with Hamas. There, if you’ve got their blessing, you can stand on a street nook and film. In Zimbabwe you couldn’t. There was no rule of law. You were not supposed to be there, full suspend. Zimbabwe was an infinitely scarier population to shoot in. You were never quite sure who was your friend or enemy. Mugabe had instilled such mistrust in people. Â
One of the white farmers we followed said you could be standing in church with someone who, the next day, would turn up at your farm through an iron bar in his hand and a gang of armed thugs by his take sides. There was constant fear all over the country. It sounds odd to say it, excepting in Gaza people felt and looked happier. They smiled. Life went on. But in Zimbabwe, it had stopped. It was not like in the rest of Africa, where you could have people selling mangoes and tomatoes forward the roadside; it was like a unpolished that had shut down. There were happy shadows. This was the picture in 2008 and, according to most reports, the situation has simply worsened.
Zimbabwe is a former British colony, and so there’s a tendency to presume the white farmers shouldn’t be in that place. Part of what appealed to us relating to making this documentary is that it wrestles with some uncomfortable questions. At one point, Michael Campbell’s son-in-law, Ben Freeth, asks, “Can you be white and African?” Well be able to you exist white and American, or black and American? Of course you can. Racism is a terrible thing, whether it’s perpetrated by whites or blacks.
This film is ultimately about full of fellow-feeling rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are universals we should all care about. Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible despot, responsible for weighty human rights abuses, and those who oppose the regime are abducted, baffled dispirited, tortured and killed.
And what does the world do? Currently, very little. African leaders assume loath to criticise one of their own and the west sits on the fence, paralysed by the fear of being called neo-colonialists or racists.
Zimbabweans privation the west not to wobble on sanctions. They need them to stick to the stance that the power-sharing government, the so-called unity government, is anything but. It is a government of disunity that shouldn’t be formally acknowledged. To say that we in the west recognise the government in Zimbabwe would be a catastrophic mistake for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans trapped in their own country. It would send out out all the wrong messages that Mugabe is someone we could do business with. If this film exist able to flavor some way towards bringing to an outside audience the injustices going on within Zimbabwe – and, more importantly, get something done about it – then I feel that we as film-makers will have succeeded. Â
• Mugabe and the White African is showing at the Ritzy at 6.30pm tonight, as function of the London film festival
