A MUDDLED MYSTERY
Documentary about conspiracy theories feels much more silly than sinister
Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash in what is now Zambia in 1961, which makes his a very cold case indeed. But as Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger explains in his documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld, many people had much to gain from the death of the UN Secretary-General, including Belgian mining interests in the region, white supremacists and anyone keen on preserving the African status quo.
And the deeper Brügger gets into the story, the less the official verdict of pilot error makes
sense. He interviews eyewitnesses who recall a second plane, a mid-air explosion and the sound of gunfire.
He discovers that the body of the UN chief had an ace of spades tucked in its collar, like death’s calling card.
And he uncovers a shadowy organization straight out of a Bond film of the same era — SAIMR (pronounced “Sighmer”), the South African Institute for Maritime Research, was run by Keith Maxwell, a man given to dressing entirely in white, or on formal occasions in a 19th-century British commodore’s uniform. The white-power group did not look kindly on Hammarskjöld, who was pushing for greater African independence.
But the doc is a teetering, shambolic affair. For no other reason than dramatic licence, Brügger decides to dress up like Maxwell, and employs a pair of African stenographers who operate ancient typewriters and occasionally comment on his discoveries. The style harks back to his 2011 docu-comedy The Ambassador, a Borat-like affair that had him going undercover as a would-be buyer of blood diamonds.
Things get particularly weird when the plot shifts from the alleged murder of Hammarskjöld to a 1980s plot to poison black Africans with the AIDS virus, a conspiracy theory that most scientists admit is improbable, given the medical technology of the time. But the attacked-plane hypothesis sits on much firmer ground: A UN report in 2015 allows that an aerial attack may have taken place.
This puts viewers in a tricky position: Probably best to take the whole film with a grain of salt. And enjoy the scenes where Brügger and fellow conspiracy theorist Göran Björkdahl, dressed as colonial explorers in pith helmets, go digging for the aircraft remains with absurdly tiny shovels. The effort gets to be too much for the director, who demands they take a break. “I’m about to be throwing up,” he gasps.