The Ambassador - 2011 - No Rating

Subject:  A journalist attempts to pass as a 'business diplomat' in Africa
Director:  Mads Brugger

When I was young, I had a National Geographic book called Our World that contained maps and blurbs about all the countries of the world.  Since it was a National Geographic book, positive traits were accentuated and negative ones softened - countries with intractable civil wars were also described as beautiful, etc.  African countries's vast resources would also be mentioned, as though those were a way out of poverty and suffering for its nation's citizens.  As The Ambassador shows, suffering is only increased by the presence of valuable resources, as the world's wealthier nations figure out ways to bribe corrupt governments for cheap access to said resources.

The Ambassador is part investigative journalism, part satire, part weird Morgan Spurlock/Sascha Baron Cohen stunt.  We see secretly filmed conversations and events as Brugger obtains papers that claim he is Liberia's ambassador to the Central African Republic, papers which would enable him to transport conflict diamonds from the Republic back to Europe without scrutiny.  It's one of the strangest documentaries I've seen, but it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, in part because we're unsure just how deep the stunt goes.