The Ambassador

2011, Mads Brügger, 93 minutes, Denmark

What happens when a very white European man buys a diplomatic title which turns him into an African diplomat overnight—right in the middle of one of Central Africa's most failed nations? The Ambassador is a genre-breaking and tragic comedy about the bizarre and hidden world of African diplomacy, where gin and tonics flow on a daily basis and diamond hustlers and corrupt politicians roam free.

Mads Brügger (b. 1972) is a Danish filmmaker and television host. He is the director of Danes for Bush and The Red Chapel, ironic documentaries filmed in the United States and North Korea. In The Ambassador, Brügger impersonated a Liberian ambassador by purchasing a new identity on the black market and then proceeded to expose the ease with which people holding diplomatic titles can exploit the gem trade. As a result of the revelations in the documentary, the government of Liberia has taken legal steps to prosecute Brügger and other participants.

“The journalism in this film is as real and fact-checked as possible. With my background in journalism it is very important to me that the characters in my film are real. At the same time, my character is a piece of fiction, with elements of reality of in it. At the end of the day, you would have to agree that I really am the consulate of Liberia. But, apart from me and my secretary Maria, everybody else in the film is real. You can look them up on Google. With my character and the situations I create with my character, I do produce reality—there is a lot of Situationalism in it. I just poison the world with drops of, you know, fiction. I am interested in what this makes people do and say. That is still very real to me because they are deciding for themselves what to do and say.” —Mads Brügger

Geneva, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights, Youth Jury Award, 2012

Leuven, Docville, ConScience Award, 2012

Film Academy of Denmark, Robert Award for Best Documentary, 2012