‘We Come as Friends’ an intimate look at Africa

With much of the city still reeling from Tuesday's storm, posting a movie review on our local Spokane Public Radio station turned out to be impossible. But I thought I'd post the review here anyway. It's a review of the documentary "We Come as Friends," which is playing at the Magic Lantern:

The best documentary films provide us with an-up-close-and-personal look at something, or someone, we might otherwise know only marginally. And they do so with just the right blend of reporting and art.

Sometimes that balance tips more in one direction. Take two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, for example. Her award-winning films, 1976’s “Harlan County U.S.A” and 1990’s “American Dream,” are prime examples of straightforward documentary journalism. Contrast those with virtually anything done by Errol Morris, a 2004 Oscar winner for “The Fog of War.” Morris’ 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line” helped transform the entire industry from Kopple’s naturalistic style to something where pretty much anything goes.

That’s not to say that Morris’ best work is less serious than, say, Kopple’s. He just follows a different emphasis. As the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves. He is fascinated by strange people, by odd word choices and manners of speech, by the way that certain symbols or beliefs can become fetishes with the power to rule human lives.”

Much the same can be said of Hubert Sauper, the Austrian-born director of the documentary “We Come as Friends,” which is playing at the Magic Lantern. Sauper has made a movie that works both as a study of contemporary African life AND as a work of art. But Sauper, like Morris, is far more interested in the rhythms of life than in the mundane facts that journalists typically use to neatly sum it up.

Sauper, whose previous film – 2004’s “Darwin’s Nightmare” – addressed the issue of economic exploitation in Tanzania, began visiting southern Sudan before the 2011 referendum that would result in the larger country’s partition. He flew around the country in his own tiny, home-made plane – a machine that served two purposes. One, it allowed him access to backwoods locations that would have been too difficult to reach any other way. Two, its very curiosity attracted attention and helped introduce Sauper to a wide-ranging cross section of Sudanese life.

He takes us into the halls of the new government, into the work rooms of a Chinese oil-production facility, into the compounds of U.S. Christian missionaries and, most distressingly, into the various tribal Sudanese communities filled with literally dirt-poor people who are promised the most but seemingly profit the least from the money being made all around them.

Hand in hand with this message, though, are the images that Sauper and his cinematographer manage to capture: shots of his tiny plane dwarfed by giant military aircraft, of Chinese workers justifying their presence in Africa while a scene from “Star Trek” plays on a nearby television set, of missionaries handing out solar-powered electronic bibles and forcing clothing on naked children, and the faces of everyone – native and newcomer – portrayed in extreme closeup.

“We Come as Friends” is an ironic title. But in Sauper’s case, it’s more true than not. Seldom has a documentary immersed itself so far inside the culture it is portraying and with such devastating effect.