Sauper’s style demonstrates, perhaps more profoundly than Oppenheimer, how cinematic montage, that most artificial of forms, situates singular human experience within processes of historical development that extend far beyond the agencies of a given individual. Darwin’s Nightmare, for instance, takes the social, economic, and ecological impact of industrial fishing in Lake Victoria in Tanzania as its subject. Sauper’s camera cultivates an intimate rapport with its subjects, which range from Russian and Ukrainian plane crews and local industrialists to factory owners, guards, fishermen, members of the clergy, drug-addled children and prostitutes. Sauper’s cutting combines their individual testimonies with found and observational footage in order to critique neocolonial exploitation and the global market economy through metaphor, metonymy, and irony.

A sequence towards the film’s conclusion demonstrates this method in all its pertinent traits. As the passage begins, a group of Tanzanian converts are shown a film depicting Jesus miraculously overloading a fishing boat with tons of catch such that the boat almost sinks. Here a miracle, it evokes what elsewhere in the film indexes expropriation and greed—a plane so heavy with fish it failed to take flight and wound up in Lake Victoria itself. Sauper follows this cinematic parable of opulent Christian goodness with footage of the poor trawling for scraps in a dump of rotting fish carcasses. In this nightmare of grotesque poverty, steam envelops the screen and signifies not only the hellish stench that rises from the remains, but also the symbolic blindness that perpetuates political powerlessness. From here, the filmmaker shows us that a prostitute, who we earlier saw manhandled by a drunken Ukrainian pilot while singing Tanzania’s national anthem, has died. She serves as a metonym for the nation; however it is not that the post-colonial nation state Tanzania has “died” so much as it never could succeed given the global economy into which contemporary neocolonial exploitation has forced it.

We Come as Friends extends Darwin’s Nightmare into the surreal. This time, Sauper’s African odyssey is powered by a tiny, self-made flying machine, an absurd apparatus that transports the filmmaker across Sudan, a country in throes of a brutal civil war and embroiled in “civilizing” projects from abroad. Chinese oil workers, UN peacekeepers, Sudanese warlords, and American evangelicals compete for hearts and minds, resources and terrain, in this complex and deceptively humorous act of cinematic buffoonery.

Eschewing conventional talking head interviews and voice of god narration, Sauper’s filmmaking demands audiences weave together these complex and conflicting threads. Cinematic art, according to Sauper’s comments after the screening, is not built on factuality, but on the unpredictability of experience. “If it is not information and factuality that makes people understand the world and learn, but experience that makes you understand the world, then it is the obligation of art to create this experience,” he argued. “As we talk, we hear ourselves talking,” he continued. “As we talk, there is an echo, and that creates the film, and then when the film is completed, millions of people will have had this conversation.” Inscribing the “human” back into “human rights” thus demands more than expressive narratives of individual hardships; it calls for the activation of the individual spectators who constitute the publics to which human rights activism directs itself.