‘POV’ Hears Zimbabwe’s Collective Cry for Democracy and Freedom In the Riveting Documentary "President"Monday, August 8, 2022POV, America’s longest running documentary series,
Paul Whitelaw takes a look at the week ahead on our small screens and recommends Ben Whishaw in This Is Going to Hurt, Imagine with Marion Keyes and some heart-warming Valentine's fun in First Dates.
A doc whose topicality feels like a double-edged sword.
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The evidence of voting fraud during Zimbabwe’s 2018 election piles up in Camilla Nielsson’s documentary.
The 2018 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, fought between former vice president Emmerson “the crocodile” Mnangagwa and the bright young opposition candidate Nelson Chamisa, were a dismal affair rife with election fraud, if you follow the persuasive arguments mounted by documaker Camilla Nielsson in
President. Chamisa, a 40-year-old lawyer running on an anti-corruption, pro-employment platform, is obviously the people’s candidate, but can his team buck the dirty tricks and ballot-stuffing of his adversary? It’s a through-the-looking-glass moment in history that can’t help but echo the recent election furor in you-know-what-country.
President – from 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Photo: c/o Sundance Institute.
This is a a story about an enchanting young leader: an aging despot nicknamed ‘The Snake’; an inscrutable judge; Nelson Mandela’s ex-lawyer and a slain street vendor. It plays out against a backdrop of a restless population in a parched Zimbabwean summer. It’s billed as a documentary but is, in fact, a riveting thriller.
President Robert Mugabe held sham elections every five years throughout his 38 year dictatorship. In 2017, he was ousted by his own party, the ZANU-PF. The new leader, Emmerson Mnangagwa, promised a fair and transparent 2018 election. After decades of suffering, a sense of freedom was born.
President Review: Camilla Nielsson s Extraordinary Documentary Traces the Alleged Theft of an Election President Review: Camilla Nielsson s Extraordinary Documentary Traces the Alleged Theft of an Election
The Danish docmaker follows up 2014 s Democrats with another essential chapter in Zimbabwe s long, endlessly sidetracked road to democracy.
Guy Lodge, provided by
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Courtesy of EFP
“Democrats,” Camilla Nielsson’s superb 2014 documentary about the tortuous construction of Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution, was most riveting as a snapshot of a country still trying democracy on for size, wary of what it saw in the mirror. Studying the troubled coalition government that paired president Robert Mugabe’s long-ruling ZANU-PF party with the more liberal opposition of Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Alliance, Nielsson’s film posited any progress at all as fragile, easily undone by a volatile political system: Audiences might