User Reviews

After the first two Mondo Canes, famous Italian documenters Jacopetti and Prosperi went deep into Africa, which during the mid sixties was in a period of change from foreign rule to self governing. The resulting footage shot formed Africa Addio.

The film is based around the changing power structures in Africa in the sixties, after the withdraw of European rule. In a nutshell, the film is comprised of two different types of scenes; ones that involve the killing of animals by either the poachers or the African citizens, and ones that detail the humanity side, of genocides and mass killings, of exploitation, shown through helicopter rides over the thousands of littered dead bodies, and close encounters with the zealous and angry soldiers.

These scenes are when the film is at it's most dangerous and evocative for me; the footage of the film makers in a car, trying to wade through the chaos of a street in Zanzibar, before having a gun butt rammed through their window, and being pulled out to be executed. Only the quick work of a police officer, recognising their Italian, saved them for their death, as explained in the excellent documentary Godfathers of Mondo.

Another scene involves the film makers plane attempting to land on an old airstrip, before they wisely decide against it after witnessing the plane before them being burnt and the passengers being held captive.

Unfortunately, these menacing but short scenes are the highlight of the entire film, with quite a large portion of the remaining movie being based around the slaughter of animals, in a large and distressingly graphic collection of scenes. While appropriate within the context of the film, after seeing scores of elephants de-trunked, hippos skinned and antelope speared, one becomes queasy, and simply fast-forwards the offending scenes.

In essence, if Jacopetti and Prosperi had focused on the political and social-economic developments in East Africa a little more, Africa Addio would have been a more concise and rewarding affair.

That being said, Africa Addio is still remarkably well shot, edited and scored. So while the large amount of animal violence can be off-putting, it still is a good film with merit.

7/10 (As a sidenote, according to the film, the footage by helicopter of Zanzibar, taken from January 18 - 20 is the only known footage taken in the country during the genocide of Arabs in the area by the black Africans.)

somebody say, "Disgusting!" and when I realized I was the person who had said it (I was alone) I also realized that I didn't just mean the movie was disgusting but that I was disgusting for sitting through it. You want a spoiler? Here's a spoiler: the movie shows people getting killed, the camera sharing the killers' point of view, and not just once but twice, ad hoc executions of men, the second of whom is desperate to survive, to explain himself, but instead he is shot point blank twice by an affectless white mercenary, who says, "I'll do it," and walks up to him and shoots him dead. No due process, no proof of any crime except the voice-over's say-so. The first execution, about a minute earlier in the movie, is by a firing squad, sloppily carried out, and once the man is on his knees, face in the dirt, either dead or seconds away from it, a final, egregious shot is fired, apparently hitting the victim in the face and sending up a splash of dirt and blood.

If you haven't figured out by halfway through that this is the direction the movie is headed in, then you have been sucked in and manipulated by probably the most cynical excuse for a documentary ever made. Red flags immediate go up with the film's opening claim that the camera is completely objective and only reports what it sees. The film then proceeds systematically to contradict this claim by mocking everything that comes before the lens. The movie pretends empathy for the displaced, abused and murdered whites in Kenya, then shows them behaving ridiculously and exposes their complacency. A white judge sentencing Mau Mau rebels to extremely harsh punishments (though not necessarily harsh for their crimes) stifles a yawn. Telling details, you'd think, cleverly captured, except when they take their place next to other instances of derisive sound effects and people (supposedly) saying ludicrous things in ludicrous voices with their backs to the camera.

The movie combines its mocking with the kind of prurience you'd find in 1950s "sun worshipper" magazines and then with out and out salaciousness. In a scene obviously staged, the movie illustrates its completely racist point that black men, given the opportunity, lust after white women, by putting a group of clueless Africans in front of a white stripper. They don't seem to know how to react as she caresses her body, and when she encourages one man to remove the pasties from her nipples, and he does so only because he was instructed to, the poor, embarrassed man is left looking at the pasties in his hands as if he doesn't know what has just happened. The bizarre scene is then punctuated by a revelation of the stripper's face, which has been angled away from the camera to this point, and it is horsey and grotesque, with a smile that reveals frighteningly long, vampirish teeth.

If you've been fooled into thinking the film has any empathy whatsoever, you should be undeceived by the episode in which the film makers, along with some German colleagues, try to land their two planes in rebel territory in Zambia? Rwanda?, the Germans landing first and being swarmed by rebels who take them captive and burn their plane. The Italian film makers get away as their plane is shot at, leaving the Germans to their fate, and the movie excuses itself from any followup when the voice-over says, "At least they were still alive." It occurs to you at this point that the Germans may have been patsies, decoys sent in to test the waters, the proverbial canaries in the mineshaft. It occurs to you that the film makers are guilty of much more than just disingenuous bad taste. By the time we get to the animal carnage it should be clear that what we are watching is pure adventure porn. It finds the place in the viewer that is disgusted by man's inhumanity to man and to nature, panders like crazy, and then treats us to scene after scene after scene of slaughter and dismemberment. Is there empathy for the animals? Can you imagine there is in a movie so up to its chin in blood and guts? The movie goes so far as to show stillborn calves being pulled from slaughtered elephants. Point of view is a real issue here. These film makers had to have participated willingly in these travesties (including the human murders at the end) in order to turn them around and toss them in the viewers face, purposefully making you feel implicated, while they throw their hands up and say, "Hey, the camera only reports what it sees." This is a movie that lies even when it tells the truth. This is a movie that pretends sympathy with the animals while displaying almost complete ignorance of their habits and behavior. This is a movie that can't tell the difference between a stork and a vulture. This is a movie that cheapens the value of a human life for the sake of a spectacle. This is a movie that wallows in rotting corpses, the victims of political upheavals, the aftermaths of colonialism and other versions of political opportunism and corruption, and then ignores politics, ignores causes, for the sake of wading into rivers of blood, and then the movie says, "Don't blame us. The camera only reports what it sees."

Africa Addio is a documentary horror film, maybe even an exploitation film or a mondo film. It's not the scariest film I've seen, but it's definitely the most disturbing, Even with the fact I saw a cut version (128 minutes). If you dislike racism or animal cruelty/massacre/murder/poaching, then don't watch this movie. The movie itself is about Africa after decolonization, and what happened to the people and their nations. The thing about this movie is that it's hard to judge. Some scenes are real, some are staged, and a lot of the audio is re-recorded. These fake scenes and re-recordings were probably done for dramatic effect, which is obviously wrong for the filmmakers to try and make the scenes more dramatic for the entertainment of the viewer. I also don't know if it's historically accurate or not. Multiple sources have claimed the footage is real, and just as many have claimed it's faked. Whatever the movie is, it certainly gets the job done at showing the cruelty and evils on earth, while also sometimes showing the happy moments (I mean the scenes that weren't faked). Some scenes were just heartbreaking and really evoked emotion out of me (but the realness of a few of the said scenes are questionable). In the end, Most of the movie was somewhat good. Another thing: at over 2 hours, the runtime stretched past it's welcome (by 20 minutes or so in my opinion). The soundtrack and cinematography were powerful at least. Overall, it's a sometimes real, sometimes staged, sometimes disturbing, sometimes powerful documentary. 6/10.

This film is an uneasy time capsule. While the early narration clearly bemoans the end of Colonialism in Africa, the 135 minutes of footage that follows clearly justifies the stance of the filmmakers on that point. Basically it says that the handover comes too soon, before Africans are truly ready to rule themselves effectively.

This film chronicles the handover of power in several former Colonies, chiefly Tanzania and Kenya, but also a few others. It contains authentic footage of Uhuru rallies, the trials and aftermaths of the Mau-Mau revolutionary movement, and the countless slaughter of both animals and humans alike. In particular, the revolution in Zanzibar under John Okello, and the resulting massacre of some 5000 Arab men, women, and children is clearly exposed, with scenes of mass shootings, mass graves, truckloads of bodies, and beaches littered with corpses as far as the camera can see.

Filmed to shock? Maybe, but then again this really happened on the Dark Continent. The film is not without humor however, in particular one scene where an aspiring African politician makes his case to a bunch of tribal people with his bullhorn mounted to the back of a donkey, while a herd of goats knocks over his microphone into the mud. But images like this fade quickly when the viewer watches miles and miles of animal bones and carcasses littering the landscape, hunters killing elephants with the aid of helicopter terrorism, and Belgian paratroopers who execute people on camera in an effort to save a group of missionaries.

All in all this is a very important film for anyone interested in how the current state of affairs in Africa got their beginnings. Blame is squarely placed on both the colonial powers, and the new African rulers for failure to effect a proper transfer of power. This version of the film is available in both the Mondo Cane box set, and the far cheaper(in price) two-disc Shocumentary Extreme collection from Blue Underground.

First of all I must say I'm currently filled with disgust with many of the comments expressed here. There is no reason for whites to take pleasure debasing themselves for acts they haven't personally been part of. If readers involved are so humane to forgive blacks for their past faults against whites (some of them portrayed in this very documentary), why can't they reciprocate this forgiveness for white men as well. The answer is more than obvious: their "humane" anti-racism is nothing more than mindless anti-WHITE racism using a rehashed Marxist rhetoric.

That being said, this unique documentary tries to cover the critical period when, caught between a climate of social unrest in their home countries (fuelled by "progressives" of the above type) and soviet-backed rebellions in their colonies, Europeans powers started to withdraw from their possessions. While doing so, they left behind their houses, their roads, their cities, their electricity, their civilization and never forgot to pour in billions in foreign aid for what soon became a hungry continent. How did the post-colonial regimes reciprocate? - They raped and massacred white nurses, who came there to provide FREE MEDICAL CARE for them. When a couple of white mercenaries went into a rescue mission and captured the ones involved in these unspeakable acts, one of the misguided viewers feels empathy for the black murderers (but none at all for the massacred white nurses)...

• They seized white estates using a "Africa for the Africans" rhetoric. Not a single "anti-racist" objects to this RACE right, although if we'd claim exactly the same for ourselves that would be, in their mind, "racism". Absolutely no compensation was given to the owners, as the movie shows. Once occupied by their "rightful" owners (according to anti-racists), estates went into normal African dereliction, horses were eaten and farmlands yielded no more crops. In no time, the same nation was begging for white man's MORAL DUTY TO HELP, although no amount of white financial compassion seems able to curb the "white devil" holly truth. Fact is, as the movie shows, each and every black African country followed exactly the same path: whites' properties seizing, dictatorship, bloody civil wars, begging for foreign aid, then while cashing in for the aid complaining that whites try to resurrect the colonial system by keeping blacks in a receiving state... Zimbabwe is the most recent example, while the acclaimed "new" South-Africa, where whites have been compelled through draconian international sanction to hand over the country they've built to its "rightful owners", represented through the voice of black communist leaders taught how to apply class struggle theories to a race struggle reality.

• They tried to line up and execute all remaining whites (Congo), only to be narrowly rescued by an US Commando. This act caused international uproar not because of Afro-Communist Congolese government's intention, but for US' intrusion into a sovereign nation's businesses...

• Soon upon consuming what whites left behind, African nations developed into Marxist dictatorships, as practically all of the "liberation movements" were backed by Soviet Union. The "dear leaders" imposed draconian control over their subjects, becoming unspeakably rich communists, while their naturally apathetic African subjects sunk into even greater destitution. The absurd linear borders, who kept rival tribes within the same country, while splitting others between two countries, have also contributed to an intrinsic lack of stability in African countries, where ethnic-based militia battle for dominance on ruins of a former colony.

Ultimately, this movie is unique among its own kind by showing glimpses of empathy for whites, which is quite simply considered RACIST (!) these days.

Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi could have stopped with Mondo Cane, but no, they had more people to educate. And offend. Actually, mostly offend. This three-year in the making ode to the end of the colonial era in Africa is a barrage of brutality, set to the wonderous music of Riz Ortolani.

Some claimed that the scene that shows the execution of a Congolese Simba Rebel had been filmed expressly for the film, which led to Jacopetti's arrest on charges of murder. The film was seized by police and editing for the movie had to stop. When Prosperi produced documents proving they had arrived at the scene just before the execution, he was freed.

The American version of the film - which is the one I saw - was edited and translated without Jacopetti, who claimed that this new version of his movie Africa Addio is a betrayal. That version is missing 45 minutes of political setup and exclusively features carnage and gore.

This film more than struck a nerve. Whil Prospero would say that, "The public was not ready for this kind of truth," and Jacopetti claimed that the movie "was not a justification of colonialism, but a condemnation for leaving the continent in a miserable condition," the team's follow-up Addio Zio Tom - while intended supposedly to be an answer to the charges of racism in ths film - somehow is even more vile.

You can even see the entire film crew nearly killed while making this movie. They put their lives on the line to bring this to you. Whether you want it or are ready for it are decisions left up to you.