The Ambassador

"This conversation we're about to have never happened," says a dealer of diplomatic passports in the opening sequence of . It is a statement that sets the tone for a substantial part of this secretly shot film, and also proves the value of the method. reveals the dark side of Africa, an underworld that cannot be recorded in any other way. Mads Brügger is a Danish journalist and master satirist who won the 2010 Sundance World Cinema Documentary Award for , in which he manages to get a Danish-Korean acting duo into North Korea for a performance. This time, dressed as a neo-colonialist, he sets off for the Central African Republic to impersonate the Liberian consul. He sets up a match factory run by pygmies as a cover for his ambitions in diamond trafficking. But Brügger is really there to show how the power in the country is allotted and traded. This mission is most definitely not without its dangers, as borne out by the murder of the chief of the security service, a former foreign legionnaire, some time after the two meet.