“A big and intriguing documentary”
–TV America

“Sounds like a John le Carré thriller, but is anchored in fact”
–Globe and Mail

A failed coup attempt…a British mercenary in a notorious African prison…a dictator suspicious of Western powers…and beneath it all, a spectacular underwater oil reserve that the world’s major powers would love to get their hands on.

It may sound like the latest John LeCarré bestseller, but in fact it’s the real-life intrigue of Once Upon a Coup, WIDE ANGLE’s penetrating look at the mysterious goings-on in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation newly rich with oil and infamous for corruption. The story begins in 2004, when a group of mercenaries, including a British ex-special forces officer named Simon Mann, is arrested in Zimbabwe. Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, accuses them of plotting a coup against him. When Mann is sentenced to 34 years in Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Black Beach prison, he claims to be only one piece of an international plot to control the country’s vast oil resources. Once Upon a Coup travels the globe to unravel that plot, which stretches from Africa to the U.K., from a prime minister’s son to Zimbabwean arms dealers, from South Africa to Spain.

But as this all plays out, another actor is bidding for a share of the oil: China. The Chinese government has showered the country with glittering new buildings and a new administrative capital. If President Obiang has grown skeptical of Western intentions, he has welcomed China as a new business partner. Starting with a small West African nation and stretching around the globe, Once Upon a Coup sheds light on the uncomfortable realities of oil politics in the 21st century.

“An amazing documentary”
–baristaexchange.com

Eleni Gabre-Madhin is a woman with a dream. The charismatic Ethiopian economist wants to end hunger in her famine-plagued country. But rather than relying on foreign aid or new agricultural technology, she has a truly radical plan. She has designed the nation’s first commodities exchange, which she hopes will revolutionize an ancient market system whose inefficiencies have been partly responsible for the country’s persistent food shortages.

In April 2008 and after more than a decade of planning, the starting bell rang on the trading floor for the first time. Gabre-Madhin has been running frantically ever since. She attempts to maintain the machinery that keeps her country fed while facing powerful special interests, antiquated farming practices, poor infrastructure, and an unpredictable climate. Not to mention a global economic crisis.

WIDE ANGLE travels to East Africa for The Market Maker, hosted by anchor Aaron Brown, to tell the dramatic, intimate story of a woman on a mission – and a world of trouble standing in her way.

“Feel-good programming that makes you think, too”
–Canwest News Service

ABOUT THE ISSUE

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s deadliest place to give birth. Each year over a quarter of a million women die in childbirth in the region. But Mozambique is combating high maternal death rates by implementing unconventional programs.

After the country declared its independence from 400 years of Portuguese rule in 1975, a civil war raged for 16 years, killing a million people and wrecking the country’s infrastructure. By the time the war ended in 1992, the health care system was devastated and one in ten women were dying in childbirth. There were only 18 obstetricians for a population of 19 million. Since then, Mozambique has cut the maternal death rate in half.

As the figures now stand, the country is one of the few countries on track to achieve the fifth United Nations Millennium Development goal to reduce the maternal death rate by 75 percent by 2015. In 2004, Mozambique introduced a new health care initiative to train midwives in emergency obstetric care in an attempt to guarantee access to quality medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.

ABOUT THE FILM

The film Birth of a Surgeon follows Emilia Cumbane, one of the first midwives-in-training. She performs Cesareans and hysterectomies in makeshift operating rooms in rural Mozambique. We follow Cumbane from her home in the Mozambican capital Maputo, into intensive medical classes, through night shifts in the delivery wards, and watch as she fights for recognition of her surgical competence.

With more than half a million women dying in pregnancy or childbirth worldwide, Mozambique’s surgical training programs are being hailed as a model solution in confronting the maternal health crisis facing developing countries. The film captures one woman’s story on the frontlines of improving maternal mortality but it also demonstrates how low-cost, community-based health initiatives are changing the face of public health in Africa.

“I like to be a midwife,” Cumbane says. “I think it’s a good profession – to produce people.”

The first class of almost 30 surgical midwives trained in delivery techniques and advanced surgery graduate in July 2008. For the 2009 update, WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown travels to a rural hospital in Mozambique to meet with Cumbane to see how both she and the program are faring. Cumbane, now the head of the maternal ward, has a two-week-old baby herself, and Brown explores the successes and obstacles she has faced over the last year, as she has tried to juggle her personal and professional commitments, all the while working to help save women’s lives.

Zimbabwe is suffering from hyperinflation, chronic food shortages, and a cholera epidemic that has infected almost 70,000 people and killed more than 3,000 since August. Education is in a disastrous state, with 94 percent of rural schools closed as teacher’s complain that their meager salaries don’t even cover the cost of the bus ride to work. Unemployment is estimated at 90 percent. Tsvangirai and his arch-rival Mugabe must now work together to confront the massive humanitarian and economic crisis facing their country.

Underground Zimbabwe, a two-part FOCAL POINT feature, goes undercover with independent journalist and native Zimbabwean Robyn Kriel as she surreptitiously films what life has been like under President Robert Mugabe for activists, journalists, and the millions of Zimbabweans who go to great lengths to get food staples everyday.

In Zimbabwe’s Life Lines, Kriel examines Zimbabwe’s devastating food crisis. She meets with shop owners whose stores are empty and those who try to make a living from Zimbabwe’s thriving black market. In Demonstrating Under Dictatorship, Kriel follows the non-violent street protests of the 40,000 member strong activist group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA).

ABOUT THE ISSUE

The region of Northern Uganda was ravaged by one of Africa’s longest civil wars until 2006. For over 20 years, more than 65,000 children, some as young as five years old, have been kidnapped by Uganda’s anti-government rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and forced to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves.

Under the command of LRA leader Joseph Kony, these children have been terrorized into committing the worst atrocities, even killing their own families. Lord’s Children follows three former LRA soldiers who escaped from the bush and have since taken refuge in a rehabilitation center.

ABOUT THE FILM

WIDE ANGLE is with the center’s counselors as they help the physically and emotionally scarred children put their lives back together. Jennifer Akelo was abducted by the LRA when she was nine years old, handed a gun and trained to fight. Raped by a rebel soldier, Jennifer now fears that she is HIV positive. Kilama, 13, is rejected by his grandmother who is fearful of his turbulent past. Homeless, he wanders to the nearby city, like thousands of other children, in constant fear of being re-kidnapped by the rebels.

At a young age, Francis witnessed two children executed with machetes for not following orders. Terrified of a similar fate, he fled and now hopes to be reunited with his mother. As these children piece their lives together, the LRA continues to carry out attacks in the region. While the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Kony in 2005, he remains at large hiding in the jungle of neighboring Congo, where he and his followers have been accused of more child kidnappings.

Read the latest news on the crisis in Darfur.

ABOUT THE ISSUE

In the half-century since Sudan was granted independence from colonial rule, the country has been in a chronic state of civil war. Most of the fighting has been between the Arab-controlled central government in Khartoum and rebels in the predominantly Christian and animist south. But in 2003, rebels in the Darfur region of western Sudan — a predominantly black, Muslim area — rose up against the central government, angered by the economic and political marginalization of their region.

In response, government-backed militias known as the janjaweed began a “scorched earth” campaign — riding on horseback, the janjaweed looted shops, raped women, and burned entire villages to the ground. Five years later, United Nations officials estimate that as many as 300,000 people may have been killed, and more than 2.5 million have been displaced.

ABOUT THE FILM

The film Heart of Darfur captures the desperation of daily life in remote villages, crowded refugee camps and in El Fasher, the once sleepy capital of North Darfur that is now home to 100,000 refugees and 10,000 U.N. personnel.

Heart of Darfur takes a look at the people and places affected by the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Our cameras follow the people working to bring an end to the conflict and suffering, such as Mohamed Siddig Suliman, a Darfuri aid worker who has been working in the region for more than 20 years. We travel into the expanding Sahara desert with Siddig, where, he explains, three decades of drought conditions have led to fighting over scarce resources—one of the root causes of the conflict in Darfur.

We also meet General Martin Luther Agwai, the former head of the Nigerian Armed Forces, who now leads UNAMID, the joint U.N./African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur. The film follows Gen. Agwai as he helicopters into hostile areas to meet with leaders of various rebel factions. We learn that he is concerned about the fragmentation of the rebel groups, the logistics of UNAMID’s deployment, the expectations on the mission, and the limits of his power. Still, Gen. Agwai manages to have a positive outlook.

“It is in our culture in Africa that everywhere we are our brothers’ keepers,” he says.

WIDE ANGLE is on the ground as the Democratic Republic of Congo holds its first elections in 45 years — an election supported by more than $450 million from the United Nations. The stakes are high in Congo, a nation rich in timber, diamonds, and coltan — a substance essential for small electronics from cell phones to laptops to Play Stations — but the country is reeling from decades of dictatorship and a civil war that left more than four million dead. We follow a former school principal running for parliament who sees her Christian faith as the means for improving living conditions in a country where the per capita income is $100 per year. And we explore what the election means to ordinary Congolese like Jean “McCoy” Kajanda, a would-be accountant who instead spends his days knee-deep in a muddy river bed, sifting the soil for diamonds, earning less than a dollar a day — not always enough for his wife, Sophie, to feed their three young children. Through a diversity of voices in a country rarely seen on U.S. television, “Democracy in the Rough” immerses us in a nation haunted by war, threatened by corruption, and torn over how to move toward a democratic and more promising future.

Along the border between unstable and destitute Zimbabwe, and relatively calm and prosperous Botswana, a 300-mile, 8-foot high electric fence is being erected. Every night, Botswana’s armed soldiers try to stop border jumpers from climbing over or cutting through the fence in their desperate search for employment and food. “Border Jumpers” takes us inside the human drama behind this frontier flashpoint, profiling illegal immigrants threatened with repeated arrest and deportation, a cattle farmer who strongly supports the fence, and a journalist who reports daily on growing fears among Botswana’s citizens that their 1.7 million people could be overrun by Zimbabwe’s troubled 12 million.

About the Film

While the Olympics are underway in Greece this summer, WIDE ANGLE presents the story of a unique marathon that is staged annually — in one of the world’s most punishing deserts — in the hope of drawing attention to the plight of the Sahrawi people. Torn by years of bitter guerilla warfare fought against Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in 1976, the Sahrawi are still waiting for the referendum on sovereignty promised in a UN-brokered cease-fire over a decade ago. The story focuses on two competitors — Abdullah, a Sahrawi self-trained runner determined to win the race for his people, and Jorge Aubeso, a top Spanish athlete sympathetic to the cause — who race through brutal heat and infamous sirocco sandstorms with winds up to 60 mph. The filmmakers — one of only two media crews covering the event — have full access to this unusual race and to the all-but-forgotten story of 165,000 people who sense that the global spotlight is no longer theirs and fear that their problem may never be resolved without a return to armed conflict. This poignant story is representative of the aspirations of small, forgotten minorities throughout the world.

A penetrating report on black economic empowerment in post-apartheid South Africa, where whites still earn an average of $6,300 each year, while blacks bring home only $950. The documentary focuses on Uthingo, the consortium of black-empowerment companies that manages the national lottery. Created under legislation enacted by the African National Congress (ANC) government, the lottery is an example of its black economic empowerment principles, designed to help transfer more of the nation’s wealth and opportunity into the hands of South Africa’s black majority. Uthingo won the extremely competitive bid to manage the lottery because its empowerment profile was so strong: currently, 96% of its workers are from previously disadvantaged groups. While Uthingo has created 10,000 new jobs, mostly for black South Africans, broad social change, including black ownership and participation in other industries, is slow in coming. Ironically, buying a lottery ticket may still offer the best chance of riches for many. The film reveals the stark contrasts among the lives of South Africans almost ten years after the demise of apartheid. Some believe they were financially better off before, and while the ANC government of President Mbeki has improved living conditions for black South Africans, the clock is still clearly ticking to do even more to improve life for the black majority — or face the consequences.

In Sub-Saharan Africa today, AIDS is not only a vast humanitarian tragedy, but also a dire threat to regional stability. As death rates from AIDS exceed the rate at which teachers, doctors, and security forces can be trained and maintained, whole nations may begin to collapse. Perhaps the only benefit from Angola’s long civil war is that the country now has one of the lowest HIV infection rates in Southern Africa. Strategically important because of its oil reserves, Angola is now coping with the problems of peace. As refugees and soldiers return home and transportation and trade resume, the spread of AIDS looms. In response to this new enemy the government has once again rallied its military forces. WIDE ANGLE explores the role of the military, the only functioning arm of the state, in its bold attempt to combat the AIDS pandemic. The challenges it faces offer an arresting portrait of a nation at a crucial moment in history.