I want to go directly to a moment that’s late in The Ambassador, a film about African corruption. The Danish narrator/star/director Mads Brügger is in his office, which is a penthouse in a crumbling hotel in the heart of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, a French-speaking country that was once ruled by Jean-Bédel Bokassa—the dictator/madman who was friendly with France, was rumored to have stuffed his subjects with rice and eaten them, and had a coronation that lasted two days and allegedly cost more than the annual budget of the Central African Republic. (Wikipedia: “The ceremony was organized by French artist Jean-Pierre Dupont. Parisian jeweler Claude Bertrand made his crown, which included diamonds. Bokassa sat on a two-ton throne modeled in the shape of a large eagle made from solid gold.”)
The Dane is in the office he has set up for the purpose of showing how easy it is for a rich European to obtain diplomatic status from a poor African country (in this case Liberia) and transport “blood diamonds” out of a war-torn African country (CAR) with complete immunity. In front of his desk are two male pygmies he has hired to help him open a match factory (this is another story). The pygmies look bored. The Dane puts a tape recorder on the desk and plays the mating songs of whales to the bored pygmies. The whales sing, the pygmies stare dumbly at the strange sounds, and the Dane is having a ball exposing all of this corruption and stupidity in Africa. Yes, I’m not a fan of this movie. The Borat thing does wonders for bloated America, but not for desperately poor and long-exploited Africa. SIFF Film Center, opens Sept 7. 
