Mugabe and the White African in Wotton

Gloucestershire filmmakers’ award-winning documentary Mugabe and the White African will be shown at Wotton Electric Picture House, with a chance to quiz the producers.

Mugabe and the White African, an intimate and often terrifying film described as the only documentary feature film to have come out of Zimbabwe in recent years, will be shown at The Electric Picture House cinema in Wotton-under-Edge.

The winner of a prestigious British Independent Film Award, nominated for a BAFTA Award, and shortlisted for an Oscar nomination, Mugabe and the White African has been impressing critics since its London debut and now Gloucestershire audiences can judge the film for themselves.

Made by Stroud-based Arturi Films, the film’s producers David Pearson and Elizabeth Morgan Hemlock will be answering questions at the end of the final Wotton Electric screening on Sunday 14 March 2010, with more chances to see the documentary on Thursday 4 and Tuesday 9 March 2010.

Filmed in 2007, the documentary focuses on Michael Campbell – one of a handful of white farmers still left in Zimbabwe since President Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned land and redistribute it to poor black Zimbabweans.

Organisers say: ‘since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands, now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife amongst the majority of the country’s citizens, but 74-year-old Mike refuses to back down.

‘Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 2008 presidential election, Mugabe and the White African follows Mike and son-in-law Ben Freeth’s harrowing attempt to take Mugabe to an international court for racism and violation of their human rights.’

Described as perhaps the outside world’s only real glimpse of what it is like to live inside Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and shot almost entirely covertly to avoid to arrest, the chance to see this powerful story on the big screen shouldn’t be missed.