(He also, judging by his own words, has the mentality of a boxer, where he must be the last man standing in the ring holding the championship over his head.) Yet, there is probably a certain level of embarrassment when he cannot rouse a crocodile’s attention despite obnoxious clapping.
He speaks highly of himself, insisting that all the people of Uganda love him. GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA: A SELF PORTRAIT is documentation of a man who is both egomaniacal and hypersensitive. Amin does not stop the filmmaker or turn the subject around he falls into a fit of hearty laughter. Consider the moment when Schroeder questions him about his saying Hitler should have killed more Jews. It was Amin’s.” Still, while so much has been set up precisely by Amin, who the dictator really is is present throughout the entirety of the documentary. Director Barbet Schroeder (1972’s LA VALLEE) noted, “I was putting fiction in a documentary, and it was not my fiction. In fact, many moments in GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA: A SELF PORTRAIT were staged and orchestrated by Amin.
It’s like one big ribbon-cutting ceremony, only this one ends with bullets in citizens. It is all, as some may immediately suspect, a show, a performance. Uganda was deemed “lawless.”Īnd then the viewer hears the subject speak for the first time, here in the third person: “The whole worlds are looking at General Amin and at Uganda as a whole.” GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA: A SELF PORTRAIT, in its too-brief runtime, does just that. At one point, Asians owned 80% of the economy, to which the man launched an “economic war.” There, too, were public executions, and multiple people went missing. The man encouraged Nixon to have a speedy recovery after Watergate. Then there is a painting of a smiling man, a lieutenant who grew to be chief of staff and would soon after overthrow the country’s leader, Milton Obote. Major exports include coffee, cotton and copper.
In the opening moments of the documentary, narration introduces the small country of Uganda, a population of 10 million.