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The Guardian’s obituary of Bell Pottinger’s Lord Tim Bell left a sour taste in my mouth after seeing so many talking heads of the late public relations executive in Richard Poplak and Diana Neille’s documentary, Influence. A South African-made documentary about the rise and fall of Bell Pottinger, a London based PR firm and the world’s most dangerous public relations company, Influence was selected as a candidate for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
The documentary zooms its lens on how Bell Pottinger made its debut in South Africa and how its relationship with strange bedfellows such as the Gupta family and Former South African President Jacob Zuma contributed to the brainwashing of millions of South Africans.
A cigarette loosely balanced between the fingers on his right hand, Bell denies any and all accusations of wrongdoing on his part, at the same time exhaling a plummet of smoke from his already frail body.
"So much of power is an illusion, and so much of influence is a delusion." - Lord Tim Bell, Influence
The film was packed with amazing graphics, including a lot of archive footage that helped the viewer along in this terrifying tale of power and influence. Apart from the star of the film, undeterred as he was determined to speak his truth, the documentary was a veritable who's who.
What stood out the most to me, however, being a young journalist myself is the pursuit of truth by journalists like Marianne Thamm. We are shown how journalists and political figures like Phumzile van Damme were attacked by bots on Twitter when they tried to uncover the truth about the Gupta family and what they were trying to do in South Africa, they were called names, puppets of White Monopoly Capital.
South Africans were forced to shift their focus from the Gupta family, placards raised high with 'Say no to #WhiteMonopolyCapital', whilst the Gupta's continued their under the table dealings, capitalizing on the weaknesses of South Africans. There is no pie they did not have their finger in. Furthermore, making a film like this shouldn't have been easy, how many people could easily say they would put their lives and careers on the line if it meant a better South Africa? How about a dozen?
In a scene at the Daily Maverick offices in Cape Town, we see journalists rifling through a hard drive containing Gupta files, people running numbers, searching for clues, looking for loopholes, it was epic. I felt like I was there, about to be handed a file and told to look for inconsistencies.
The dynamic duo, Poplak and Neille, directors of this film, worked tirelessly to give us a 90 minute tell all and conduct an impressively thorough investigation into the politicization of modern communication. Influence is terrifyingly relevant in our current era of alternative facts and theatrical politics (Sundance).
"There are a zillion ways to make a film, there are no rules." - Richard Poplak
Visit the official Influence website here to find out more about the film and where you can watch it.
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