Global Pulse Blog

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to see a new and much-talked-about feature-length documentary, What Are We Doing Here?, at its New York City premiere.   Shot by three brothers and a cousin during a 6-month-long trek from Cairo to the southern tip of the African continent, the film has been billed as a daring and independent look at the failures of external (“Northern” or “Western”) charity and development efforts to make a substantial difference for the better in the lives of ordinary Africans.  According to the website:

Daring to ask the questions no one else will, the filmmakers invite the world to rethink the fight against poverty in Africa.  Could our good intentions be causing more harm than good?  Have humanitarian interventions prolonged suffering? Who is actually benefiting from our good intentions? These questions and many more are addressed for the first time ever in this groundbreaking feature length film.  If you ever wanted to know what happened to the $10 dollars you donated to charity last year, look no further.  This film will change the way you look at charity in Africa forever.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW20gHstfzU]

With  so dramatic a promise to challenge accepted discourse, coupled with an announcement that the filmmakers would be open to discussion and audience feedback afterward, this seemed too good to miss.

So on Friday night, I attended the premiere and reception at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. One of the four filmmakers, Mr. Brandon Klein, was present, and opened the evening by asking how many members of the audience had ever been to Africa. The response — over one-third of the students, doctors, NGO workers, and other professionals, raised their hands — seemed to signal that this was not a typical audience.   Which got me thinking:  If a film is ground-breaking to an average film-festival critic or American movie-goer, how does it hold up to an audience of peers and stakeholders?   By which criteria do we judge it?

I admit that watching the film that night, and in that audience, was not a comfortable experience.  True, it purported to be a vehicle for the voices of real people, a counterweight to a sea of undistinguishable charity television ads (featuring nameless African children, silent in the throes of famine and awaiting personal donations), and the filmmakers treated the subjects of its interviews and footage with dignity and sensitivity.  They made you feel the frustration of the teachers forced to send children home from school because there was no water for them to drink; made you empathize with the anger of the community workers who had seen aid organization upon aid organization roll into their village only to roll out before their projects were finished, with the human capital depleted a little bit more every time.  Nevertheless, I could not shake an acute awareness that I was watching a movie created by four white men, for an audience of Americans and Europeans, about an entity called “Africa” — and that I happened to be watching it in the company of nationals and scholars from a dozen African countries, who had seen their compatriots made into the subjects of dozens of features and documentaries, and been pained by it.  As the filmmakers and cameras made their dusty way through villages, camps, and shantytowns in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi, and onward, interviewing aid workers, nurses, children, dying women, and firebrand community activists, the question persisted: Was this one any different? Could it, or any “documentary”, ever be any different?

During the question-and-answer session, it became clear that many Africans and veterans of aid work in Africa did not think so. Someone pointedly commented that the film made zero effort to inform the audience about the historical context of colonialism, slavery, and power relations that had formed the basis of the impoverishment of African nations — and seemed to imply that this was a self-serving choice. Another woman stood up to challenge the narrow focus on 12 countries eastern and southern Africa, and the filmmakers’ propensity to make generalizations about the continent as a unit. My favorite response was one by an older gentleman who said he had been working in humanitarian assistance for 35 years, and could frankly imagine the same film being made 35 years ago — because what had gone unchallenged in the meantime was the not just misguided aid, but the unconscionable systemic failure of international policy at the highest levels.

So what do I think? What Are We Doing Here is aesthetically beautiful, respectful, decently balanced, and highly discussion-provoking. I am not convinced it is different or groundbreaking — but I am grateful that it has been made, and is being talked up for the broader public. I doubt that many of those who attended the premiere truly learned anything they did not know already, but such are the limitations of a self-selecting audience. If you are a student at a school that you believe is not getting adequate exposure to the debate over aid, development, and the relationship between Africa and the political West / global North, then holding a screening could be the basis for a very engaging night. It may or may not be that different from what you have seen before. It is a start, and the challenge of writing a truly different chapter is still out there for the taking.