http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2003/2003jun/030620-wouter.html
The Man Who Knows Too Much
If Wouter Basson is innocent as the court found after his two-year long trial then the question is: "Who is responsible for the many human rights abuses for which he stood accused?" Jacklyn Cock reviews Liza Key�s documentary on the man known as "Doctor Death".
In 1986 I argued that South Africa was a terrorist state, meaning a state which relied on the spread of extreme fear to maintain its authority. However at the time we were not fully aware of the horror and extent of state terrorist tactics. But lethal injections, bodies thrown into the sea, interrogation in holes in the ground and under water torture are some of the horrors documented in Liza Key's film The Man Who Knows Too Much.
Key's research for this film took her on a two-year journey to former South African Defence Force camps in remote parts of Northern Namibia, on a 600 kilometer trip up the Skeleton Coast and to Pretoria where she spent many days in Pretoria's Supreme Court while the Wouter Basson trial unfolded.
As in A Question of Madness, her film on Dimitri Tsafendas, Key avoids the didactic and in an investigative, open-ended documentary style she raises difficult questions about collective an individual responsibility. If former South African chemical and biological warfare chief, Wouter Basson is innocent as the court found after his two- year long trial then the question is; "Who is responsible for the many human rights abuses for which he stood accused?"
Is it individuals like state witness Johan Theron who - in a court recording - gives a chilling account of how he murdered hundreds of SWAPO prisoner's of war's and then threw their bodies into the sea off the Skeleton Coast, is it groups of powerful men such as the SADF heirarchy or was it systemic to the apartheid regime? Key explores all these possibilities through a series of interviews with informants ranging from former of head of SADF, Constand Viljoen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an ex SWAPO prisoner of war and a former SADF recce
Frustrated in her attempts to gain access to the key players in her story Key relies on journalist Marlene Burger's meticulous and riveting reports of the Basson trial, the original court recordings of witnesses' testimonies and videoed TRC footage to tell her story. Beautiful aerial shots of Namibia's harsh desert landscapes and desolate Skeleton Coast where hundreds of nameless bodies lie creates a chilling sense of immediacy
Part of the power of this documentary lies in the banality of the individuals and the ordinariness of the buildings. Roodeplaat Research Laboratory looks innocuous enough from the outside but was the site of crazy science and horrific animal experimentation. The film depicts a brief and shocking scene of such cruelty. Video footage from the TRC of Roodeplaat's scientists giving testimony show benign looking men talking in a most reasonable way about plans to manufacture an ethnically specific drug to make black people infertile.
The Man Who Knows Too Much is infused by Key's indignation and compassion for both human and animal victims and is dedicated to the victims of the 30 years war in Southern Africa.
Key presents a complex and nuanced picture of this period in South Africa's history
In its avoidance of easy answers the film will not satisfy everybody but it makes for riveting viewing.