We Come as Friends

Next to UN cargo planes, the tiny aircraft which director Hubert Sauper helped to build looks like a toy. Touching down on grassy strips and military airports in Sudan, shortly before the country's partition in 2011, he visits people and places in one of the world’s most politically confusing regions. Sauper meets and interviews both Sudanese and international decision-makers, politicians and profiteers, but he also makes chance acquaintances. He visits Chinese crude oil workers in their barracks as they watch the German science fiction series ‘Raumpatrouille Orion’, shake their heads at European dreams of being a major power and ponder the cultural gap between themselves and Africans which necessitates certain ‘precautionary measures’. The local people on the other side of the fence of the oil fields are afraid of being evicted from their wretched huts. On TV Hillary Clinton claims ‘we’ don’t want a new form of colonialism in Africa, while her compatriots rave about ‘win-win situations’. But who exactly is ‘we’? The film forgoes an answer to make us aware of the complexity of one of the most controversial questions of our time. A puzzling, challenging and provocative documentary.