President

This gripping documentary from Camilla Nielsson, who gave us 2016’s Democrats, chronicles the 2018 Zimbabwe election in remarkable detail. Playing much like a political thriller – although some of the real-life events might not be believable in a fiction film – the film documents the election battle between Nelson Chamisa of the MDC opposition party and Zanu-PF’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, who ousted long-time dictator Robert Mugabe but who is clearly very much of the same cloth as the man who ruled the country with an iron fist for 40 years while gradually destroying the economy and imposing a culture of state violence. As the election looms closer, it becomes increasingly clear that a valid democratic process would lead to the election of Chamisa as president and MDC as the ruling party. However, as with so many strong-man ‘democracies’ in the 21st century, an election is no guarantee of a democratic outcome.