Some messages, even if they’re familiar, need to be repeated. Filmmaker Hubert Sauper’s scalding documentary We Come as Friends reminds us yet again of the ongoing monstrous behavior visited upon Africa by the rest of the developed world, which harvests the continent’s resources at the expense of its people. Other recent nonfiction films, including Sauper’s Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare, may have covered similar terrain, but the anger and sophistication he wields throughout We Come as Friends make this a standout and a worthy addition to the current, ever-clamoring chorus of protesting voices.
2004’s Darwin’s Nightmare focused on Tanzania, using the country’s export of fish to Europe as a jumping-off point to discuss the poverty and inequality elsewhere in the African nation. We Come as Friends doesn’t have quite as fascinating a central hook, but that scarcely matters: Filmed over the course of several years, this new film takes place mostly in South Sudan as it’s about to declare its independence from Sudan in 2011. Less a tight narrative than an atmospheric snapshot of different communities within the country, We Come as Friends introduces us to Chinese oil riggers, Christian evangelists from Texas, UN officials and ordinary Sudanese citizens who cannot escape the influence of these disparate outsiders. Sauper, his cameramen and editors never linger too long on any one location, preferring to shape the material around a central thesis: South Sudan may be independent, but it’s sure not free.
As in Darwin’s Nightmare, Sauper proves to be a superb fly on the wall, insinuating himself with his subjects so they reveal their true natures without ever realizing it. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that they simply don’t care how callous they sound.) A British worker blithely comments that the Sudanese are 200 years behind the rest of the planet in their technological development, judging the locals harshly without any self-awareness that Europeans like him have aided this imbalance. Christian missionaries cheerfully insist on bringing their faith to the Sudanese, more concerned about pushing religion on the people than in teaching them to read and write. (One evangelical smugly dismisses the locals’ annoyance that he put a fence around his property, thereby cutting off grazing area for their cattle. “They got over it,” he says.) Everywhere We Come as Friends wanders, tension, poverty and exploitation can be observed, the crassness of the white opportunists a sickening refrain.