I first viewed this film (in it's 140 minute original cut)after trying to find out information about the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964 when up to 20,000 Arabs were massacred by African revolutionaries.I was directed to this film and I could not believe such an important film has been banned and damned by most countries in Europe and The USA.It may sound and look racist when you are viewing it but it highlights valid points such as the mindless slaughter of animals (formerly protected by British Authorities)and the need by the new governments to destroy the perfectly workable Colonial infrastructure that they inherited. The racist murders by Black on White and Black on Arab are documented and leaves you feeling chilled that the new Black Administrations motivation was only to childishly say WE ARE African...YOU ARE NOT!, when you are confronted with this it is difficult not to dismiss the entire continent as a busted flush. The film concentrates on just 2 years 1963-64 (when many of the former British and Belgian colonies became independent.The scenes of the Zanzibar Revolution are terrifying you get a feeling of helplessness as the helicopter flies over hundreds of Arabs running into the sea to escape from Blacks with guns, and the day after when the helicopter returns to the same spot........we see that all these people have been butchered, lying on the blood soaked sand in white robes. The main problem with this film is that we are to blame because we never want to see another race in this light and the truth is hidden, when in fact it should be viewed and debated. this is a true masterpiece.

Quite the conundrum, 80% of the comments focus only on the violence, which is extreme and relentless at times. It should also be noted that the film clocks in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, and, there is a whole other world being presented when the violence stops. Quite simply, the cinematography will knock your socks off; we're talking major motion picture stuff with an original score that keeps evolving and is quite breathtaking(i still haven't seen this on a big screen but, wow). Speaking of breathtaking, visually this film is a feast for the eyes, it's hard to believe at times that i'm watching a documentary; a documentary that will open you up and get inside you and everyone that sees it, with no pun intended and no shame. As someone else said here, it is 'an uneasy time capsule'. The brutality, perfectly balanced with tender and profound beauty. Real situations balanced with oddity and humor.I mean, the directors won an Oscar for cinematography just before this and at one part of the film they are a breath away from being executed, only to be saved by an officer who points out that they are Italian. Now in 2009, and every day forward until the end of civilization, this collection of moving pictures becomes more and more potent, gaining credence with every new low that so-called 'modern' humanity sinks to, with the temporal yet exquisite fruits of it's labor always just out of reach of the masses. AN ABSOLUTE MUST SEE

somebody say, "Disgusting!" and when I realized I was the person who had said it (I was alone) I also realized that I didn't just mean the movie was disgusting but that I was disgusting for sitting through it. You want a spoiler? Here's a spoiler: the movie shows people getting killed, the camera sharing the killers' point of view, and not just once but twice, ad hoc executions of men, the second of whom is desperate to survive, to explain himself, but instead he is shot point blank twice by an affectless white mercenary, who says, "I'll do it," and walks up to him and shoots him dead. No due process, no proof of any crime except the voice-over's say-so. The first execution, about a minute earlier in the movie, is by a firing squad, sloppily carried out, and once the man is on his knees, face in the dirt, either dead or seconds away from it, a final, egregious shot is fired, apparently hitting the victim in the face and sending up a splash of dirt and blood.If you haven't figured out by halfway through that this is the direction the movie is headed in, then you have been sucked in and manipulated by probably the most cynical excuse for a documentary ever made. Red flags immediate go up with the film's opening claim that the camera is completely objective and only reports what it sees. The film then proceeds systematically to contradict this claim by mocking everything that comes before the lens. The movie pretends empathy for the displaced, abused and murdered whites in Kenya, then shows them behaving ridiculously and exposes their complacency. A white judge sentencing Mau Mau rebels to extremely harsh punishments (though not necessarily harsh for their crimes) stifles a yawn. Telling details, you'd think, cleverly captured, except when they take their place next to other instances of derisive sound effects and people (supposedly) saying ludicrous things in ludicrous voices with their backs to the camera.The movie combines its mocking with the kind of prurience you'd find in 1950s "sun worshipper" magazines and then with out and out salaciousness. In a scene obviously staged, the movie illustrates its completely racist point that black men, given the opportunity, lust after white women, by putting a group of clueless Africans in front of a white stripper. They don't seem to know how to react as she caresses her body, and when she encourages one man to remove the pasties from her nipples, and he does so only because he was instructed to, the poor, embarrassed man is left looking at the pasties in his hands as if he doesn't know what has just happened. The bizarre scene is then punctuated by a revelation of the stripper's face, which has been angled away from the camera to this point, and it is horsey and grotesque, with a smile that reveals frighteningly long, vampirish teeth.If you've been fooled into thinking the film has any empathy whatsoever, you should be undeceived by the episode in which the film makers, along with some German colleagues, try to land their two planes in rebel territory in Zambia? Rwanda?, the Germans landing first and being swarmed by rebels who take them captive and burn their plane. The Italian film makers get away as their plane is shot at, leaving the Germans to their fate, and the movie excuses itself from any followup when the voice-over says, "At least they were still alive." It occurs to you at this point that the Germans may have been patsies, decoys sent in to test the waters, the proverbial canaries in the mineshaft. It occurs to you that the film makers are guilty of much more than just disingenuous bad taste. By the time we get to the animal carnage it should be clear that what we are watching is pure adventure porn. It finds the place in the viewer that is disgusted by man's inhumanity to man and to nature, panders like crazy, and then treats us to scene after scene after scene of slaughter and dismemberment. Is there empathy for the animals? Can you imagine there is in a movie so up to its chin in blood and guts? The movie goes so far as to show stillborn calves being pulled from slaughtered elephants. Point of view is a real issue here. These film makers had to have participated willingly in these travesties (including the human murders at the end) in order to turn them around and toss them in the viewers face, purposefully making you feel implicated, while they throw their hands up and say, "Hey, the camera only reports what it sees." This is a movie that lies even when it tells the truth. This is a movie that pretends sympathy with the animals while displaying almost complete ignorance of their habits and behavior. This is a movie that can't tell the difference between a stork and a vulture. This is a movie that cheapens the value of a human life for the sake of a spectacle. This is a movie that wallows in rotting corpses, the victims of political upheavals, the aftermaths of colonialism and other versions of political opportunism and corruption, and then ignores politics, ignores causes, for the sake of wading into rivers of blood, and then the movie says, "Don't blame us. The camera only reports what it sees."

This just aired on the small (digital) "culture" channel here in Finland. I am not sure whether this was the censored or the uncensored version - if this was the censored one I don't even want to think about what might be in the uncensored version.Very very very impressive photography and - above all - editing. It *is* in parts very gruesome (esp. animal lovers should be prepared for some depictions of mindless cruelty) - but it also shows beautiful things, black, white, animal and floral.That this is hard to come by today I can understand, it is just impossible politically incorrect (and must have been so at the time too). The makers of this movie seem to sympathise with everyone and no-one