This sounds excellent.
During
an interview JOE, the director of Blood Diamond, Ed Zwick, described the difficulties in securing finances for a big budget drama.
"It's very hard to get those films financed. Very hard," said Zwick, who has also directed Glory and The Last Samurai.
"Somehow, the film studios have abdicated more serious films at scale. You can make serious, small independent films but they somehow discovered that they didn't have the possibility of getting those huge, huge box-office grosses on adult films with a big scale."
On that note, we're delighted to see that Ben Affleck is returning behind the lens to bring focus and attention to one of the most horrific imperial crimes that ever befell the continent of Africa.
The director of Argo, The Town and Gone Baby Gone will be directing
King Leopold’s Ghost, a fact-based drama about the plunder of the Congo's natural resources by Belgium’s King Leopold II in the late 1800s.
During this period of colonisation and mass murder, King Leopold became the world’s richest man with billions stashed in secret bank accounts after he gained private ownership of the Congo Free State.
He also inserted a mercenary army to murder the locals and plunder the Congo's rubber and ivory resources. He then forced the locals to harvest it. Those who refused were dismembered or killed - the novel on which the film is based on, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, estimates that as many as eight million people were killed in this ruthless pursuit.
Deadline have reported that King Leopold's Ghost is going to be "an account of the Congolese who defied Leopold II and fought back. Their heroic plight sparked a daring and unlikely alliance between a black American missionary, an English investigative journalist and an Irish spy that shone a light on the horrors and gave birth to the first human rights movement.
"Once photographs were made public, Leopold’s charade of spreading Christianity in the heart of darkness was exposed as a greedy ruse, and the king was assailed by the likes of Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold’s “civilising mission” led to writing Heart of Darkness."
While we're not stating that the events in Affleck's new film are the exact same as the Leonardo DiCaprio-led drama, there are some quite prevalent similarities.
Like Blood Diamond, Affleck's film portrays the greed of European countries as they race to find ways to carve up the natural resources of Africa.
Also...
- Europeans profiting from the exploitation of African resources? Check.
- Local armies being used to kill and dismember those who protested the rape of their land? Check.
- An alliance between a local native, a journalist and someone with a military background? Check.
- A director with a record of getting great performances from his cast while filming on a large cinematic canvas? Check.
Aside from directing the film, Affleck is also producing it through his Pearl Street Films banner alongside Martin Scorsese and Emma Koskoff-Tillinger.
Affleck has a personal connection with the country, having founded Eastern Congo Initiative, an advocacy and grant-making initiative focused on working with and for the people of eastern Congo to spur economic and social development and to increase the quantity of public and private funding to support those goals.
At present, no release date for King Leopold’s Ghost has been set but we'll be keeping a close eye on this one.
