Mark Reviews Movies: COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2019

Mads Brügger is a journalist, yes, but he's also a provocateur. One need only look up synopses of his previous movies as a director to see something of a pattern: Brügger shows up somewhere, pretending to someone else or claiming to have a completely different motive, and reveals some truth through his deception. That background is only relevant to Cold Case Hammarskjöld for the fact that Brügger has completely abandoned that technique for this documentary. Here, he's just a journalist, investigating the possible murder of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, in 1961.

The role suits Brügger well, which is important in this case. The film documents about six years of research and investigation on the part of the filmmaker and Swedish private investigator Göran Björkdahl, as well as almost 50 years of irregular research and intermittent investigations on the part of various theorists and official bodies of the UN. The amount of information in this documentary is overwhelming, and the evidence, as unofficial and unverified as some of the key pieces may be, that something beyond the official story happened to Hammarskjöld is convincing.

Does it tell us for certain that Hammarskjöld's death, the result of a plane crash, was actually a political assassination, not a matter of pilot error? No, it does not. It does, though, tell us why some people would have wanted him dead, how the murder could have happened, and what specific group might have possessed the motive and the means to carry out such a murder. Surprisingly, all of those details amount to what's essentially the beginning of Brügger's investigation. By the end, it has spread out to a conspiracy so sinister that the murder of the most powerful man in the UN seems like small potatoes.

The setup is fairly simple, though. Brügger, sitting in two separate hotel rooms in Africa, relates what happened on September 18, 1961, when a UN plane carrying Hammarskjöld and 15 others crashed near an airport, and the process of his investigation. Accompanied by a local secretary, each of whom types out the narrative on an old-fashioned typewriter, in each of the rooms, Brügger explains that the only man who might know what actually happened to the Secretary-General is a mysterious man, dressed all in white in the only photograph of him that seems to exist. He's the villain of the story, although Brügger, who still has a bit of the cheekiness of his previous sting-style adventures, is also dressed in similar garb.

The initial story, divided into chapters introduced by sticky notes featuring key points on a wall of each hotel room, seems fairly obvious. When he was elected as Secretary-General, Hammarskjöld seemed like a safe choice. Instead, though, he made it his mission to support the rising independence movements across the African continent, against the colonial rule of European countries. This made him the enemy of many countries and corporate interests.

For those who believe he was murdered, it is no coincidence that Hammarskjöld's plane crashed outside an airport in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). It is even less of a coincidence that the diplomat was on his way to enter into talks with the leader of a rogue, secessionist territory of the Congo, supported by Belgian mining interests. Hammarskjöld was doing work he in which he believed, and that work was a direct threat to the powers of European nations and the profits of companies.

To get into the specifics of Brügger's case would be nearly impossible. It is intensive and widespread, with Brügger and Björkdahl, who has had an almost obsessive interest in the mystery since his father gave him what was claimed to be a piece of the crashed plane, traveling to the airport in Ndola (They have pith helmets—to protect their "Scandinavian skin" and look the part of colonialists—and shovels and a high-powered metal detector, but they forget gloves) and interviewing local witnesses, whose stories either weren't believed or kept secret at the time.

The two men discover the identity of the enigmatic man in white and, through a revelation from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, seem to have a smoking gun that Keith Maxwell, the mystery man, ordered Hammarskjöld's murder. He used a seemingly innocent organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research, which was actually a white-supremacist mercenary group back by intelligence agencies in Europe and the United States, to do this and much more.

While all of this might sound rather ludicrous and/or conspiratorial, it is just the beginning. Over the course of six years, Brügger and Björkdahl interview people from a list of supposed members of the organization—all of whom deny any knowledge of or involvement in such a thing, with at least one silly alibi—and are stopped from digging up the remains of the airplane. All of this work, these interviews, this research, and this lengthy, detailed narrative seem to be for nothing. Then, they get a big break, which forces them to change the entire perspective of their investigation.

Whatever one may think of Brügger's case for Hammarskjöld's murder and the revelations about how deadly that innocuous-sounding organization actually was, there is no denying that the filmmaker takes us through his work with excruciating levels of detail, by showing us the evidence to back up his assertions, and with enough humility to admit when he has hit a dead end. The case presented by Cold Case Hammarskjöld might seem outlandish, absurd, or just plain over-the-top. It also, sadly, feels like the only logical conclusion.

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