We Come as Friends by Hubert Sauper (review)

We Come as Friends is a documentary film directed by the Austrian-born filmmaker Hubert Sauper, supported by ARTE Cinema and Eurimages. Sauper, the director of the acclaimed movie Darwin’s Nightmare (2005), which presented the invasion of a fish species around Lake Victoria in Tanzania as a metaphor for globalization and economic exploitation of the ecosystem, is dealing in this case with the consequences of neocolonialism, racism, and capitalism in Sudan after the civil war and during the early days of the new Republic of South Sudan, which became an independent state in 2011.

The film begins with a voiceover that describes the arrival of an alien’s aircraft in Africa. We are told that this Martian has only one eye (called “videocamera”), and we suddenly understand that this “alien” is in fact the filmmaker himself documenting his trips to Sudan between 2010 and 2012. The aircraft is actually a “tin-can” airplane named Sputnik, built and piloted by him. He encounters all the different realities that coexist in Africa: war, children trained to become Christian soldiers, a Chinese oil refinery next to a mosque, South Sudanese centers of political and economic power, United Nations personnel and international peacekeeping forces, American Christian missionaries (most of whom seem to do anything but good) declaring Sudan “the new Texas.” This film compares present and past, natural beauty and human interference, locals and strangers, the Western myth of progress and the worst consequences of postcolonialism.

By presenting himself as a stranger (or an alien), assuming a particular voice and recognizing its subjective point of view, Sauper creates a form of estrangement in response to this great complexity. This persona allows him to showcase local ironies, such as a United Nations ambassador trying to make a serious speech in front of a public that does not understand English. At other times Sauper attempts to establish a closer relationship with his interlocutors, letting people express themselves. For example, at one point he meets a Sudanese villager who is trying to understand the contract in which he sold his six hundred hectares of family land for the paltry sum of twenty-five dollars. In moments like this, individuals often express their confusion and show skepticism toward the future.

At no point, however, does Sauper try to demonstrate any particular point of view or to judge. On the contrary, in all these contexts he assumes a posture in which all kind of a priori ideas appear alien and strange. In this sense the documentary follows the trend in contemporary cinema in which, as Guy Gauthier suggests in Le documentarie est un autre cinema (Armand Colin, 2008), nonfiction films are moving away from the fallacy that “seeing” is equivalent to “believing.” By means of a subjective first-person enunciation, this nonfiction film confronts reality in order to problematize it and signal its inherent complexity. As Sauper explained in an interview in Filmmcomment,

so what do you describe out of this immense possibility? Out of a million people, what do you see? This is the biggest question in making movies. Nothing is sufficient. There is always 99 per cent of the picture missing. But I think the most important function of these kinds of films is to [create a] snowball.

(http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-hubert-sauper-we-come-as-friends/)

With its self-reflexive form, We Come as Friends does not attempt to answer any questions about Africa, human rights, or the human condition. On the contrary, it holds a mirror up to life. If, as Sauper suggests, “life itself is a huge compromise,” we may reformulate this claim, adding that cinema, nowadays, plays a major role in this ethical commitment.