In his Sundance winner "The Red Chapel", media prankster Mads Brügger travelled to North Korea as a communist theatre director. Now, in "The Ambassador", he has abandoned his role-playing. Or has he? In the Central African Republic on a diplomatic passport, he tries to start up a match factory with a workforce of Pygmies. Per Juul Carlsen asks why.
Now, in "The Ambassador", the 38-year-old media prankster is "beyond role-playing", as he puts it. He is an actual diplomat on a mission to another extreme country, the Central African Republic. This civil-war-ravaged former French colony, Brügger says, is a forgotten time pocket from 1970s Africa or, as he puts it in the film, "If Congo was the heart of darkness, the Central African Republic is the appendix." Brügger travels around the country wearing long boots, sunglasses and a cigarette holder perpetually lodged between his lips. He's "the Man with the Yellow Hat gone bad," Brügger says, referring to the character from the Curious George children's books.
"I found a link to a company on the Web that brokers diplomatic titles between Third World countries and crazy white men looking for a bit of panache and prestige. That seemed like a good jumping-off point for a film about Africa stripped of NGOs, sarongs, Bono, child soldiers and kids with bloated bellies, a film about the kind of people you never see in documentaries on Africa: white businessmen and the diplomats, the fat cats in the urban centres, all the people who are in Africa having a great time," he says.
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