Avis des critiques

A miraculous feat. Even setting aside the dangerous lengths the filmmaker and her team went to over three years to capture their slowly unfolding, immensely complex story, Democrats would be a praiseworthy achievement just on the strength of its handling of character and specificity. No recent documentary has given me a better, more urgently cinematic frame in which to understand another country's political ups and downs – and the social performances and power structures that help forge them.

It truly is a movie *about* politics, and it's among the more mesmerizing ones you'll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself... Watching these men, you get the sense of two distinct personalities, both of them perhaps necessary for a nascent democracy: the opportunist and the idealist. Democrats may be about one volatile country's experiment with democracy, but it has a lot to say about how politics works in every part of the world.

The film often plays like an absurdist comedy, and Nielsson's in-the-moment approach calls to mind David Mamet's theories of acting, which devalue textual interpretation, psychological explanations, and character-driven storytelling.

This account of [Mwonzora and Mangwana's] efforts shapes up to be both a heroic and an artful film, subtle and extremely affecting—proof that it doesn't take Fincher plus Sorkin to make litigation riveting. Here it took only the director, Camilla Nielsson; a cameraman, Henrik Bohn Ipsen; an editor, Jeppe Bødskov; and thirteen trips to Zimbabwe, over the course of three years, during which the nation's first post-independence constitution was being drafted.

Ms. Nielsson's cameras take us only so far behind the scenes; Mr. Mugabe's own conference rooms are never entered. But the portrait of passionate people struggling to improve their government is urgent, vivid and satisfactory. Both inspiring and upsetting, "Democrats" is, finally, a film that deserves to be called "necessary.

Nielsson weaves these complex and often outrageous political webs without artificially dramatizing the altercations.

As tense as a well-wrought political thriller, Democrats gives us intimate access to the three-year negotiation between the leader of the party propping up Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe and the opposition candidate... Most remarkable is the respect the two men show each other as they attempt to create a constitution and their sustained courage in a situation in which imprisonment, execution, or assassination loom as distinct possibilities.

Imagine every hackneyed adjective ever dropped in praise of a thriller: taut, riveting, bravua, gripping, pulse-pounding, hard-boiled, a roller coaster of emotion—it is hard not to lavish them all on Camilla Nielsson's Democrats, winner of the festival's top documentary prize.

Providing no historical or social context with which the viewer might have been able to understand the political climate of the country, filmmaker Camilla Nielsson reduces a lot of complex and historically contingent issues to simple dichotomies — right vs. left, democracy vs. dictatorship, freedom vs. authoritarianism, etc.

A standout, Camilla Nielsson's excellent, richly ironic Democrats avoids policy-paper treatment of its subject to give a breathtakingly candid, on-the-ground view of people in action. Granted extraordinary access in a country known for police-state tactics and prone to banning foreign media, Nielsson's (talking-headless) verité one-ups the classic horse race of Primary (60) with its two larger-than-life personalities and life-threateningly high stakes.

The result, filmed over three years with an astonishing level of internal access, is at once important and impishly entertaining, brightened by the kind of eccentric local color that cannot be forged or imagined.