Two Ambassadors

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

Of all the nominees for the competition I would say that Two Ambassadors is the most out of place. Whilst the other films all strive for some kind of artistic synergy, Two Ambassadors feels decidely less cinematic. I don't think that's neccessarily a bad thing, sometimes I think competition-aimed films can come across as a little too pretentious or artsy. So in light of this I really wanted to like this mockumentary/satire, and I started out with a fairly open mind and a willingness to laugh, but after a while, try as I might, I just didn't really know what was going on and this became a huge source of frustration for me.

The two ambassadors of the title are a pair of Dutch documentarians who visit Africa in order to make a film about tragic maternal deaths in the third world. For some reason they mess it up, and one of them gets a tribal woman pregnant, and a series of loose sketches play out from here, not all of which make much sense.

The general gist of 2 Ambassadors is that it's satirising the western view of Africa. I think. It's well made and all, but the script is just plain stupid. Some of the sketches are lame and the filmmakers occasionally mistake inappropriate, racist humour as cutting edge satire. Sacha Baron Cohen this aint. I still don't really understand the basic plot points of the narrative... why did they decide to make a film about maternal death? I didn't really get it, it just came off as bizarre to me. There's a good idea in here that's itching to get out and cause some hilarity, but they needed a much stronger narrative to make use of all the ironically exploitative jokes. It also doesn't help that the two main characters (the 'ambassadors') are incredibly irritating to watch.

There's a bit in the short where they satirise reality TV by contrasting African culture with western TV trends. There was a lot of potential in this idea, and the whole film probably should've been just about this, without the two Euro dickheads. The rest of the film is just too muddled... maybe it's a language barrier thing or something, it felt like it was meant to be a satire of western behaviour in Africa and the effect our culture has on Africa but sometimes it also felt like a direct satire of Africa itself (which seems like pretty poor form considering it's a third world culture!) I would rank this as my least favourite film in the Beneath the Earth competition.

DIRECTOR: Peter Sterk, Fedor van Rossem
WRITER/SOURCE: Peter Sterk, Fedor van Rossem
KEY ACTORS: Peter Sterk, Fedor van Rossem

RELATED TEXTS
- IMDB lists Two Ambassadors as a television series made in 2008. So I'm now assuming that this short film may be edited highlights from the TV show, which could account for why it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.