Film Review: A thrilling plot for peace

South Africans like to gripe about films that harp on the past, but in this 20th year of our democracy there are a number of documentaries coming out that explore our achievements and challenges.

I personally believe history is good for you, so I'm not complaining. The best audiences can hope for is that filmmakers do more than produce flat retellings of history without adding anything new.

Mandy Jacobson and Carlos Agullo's Plot for Peace adds plenty. This is the story of mysterious French businessman Jean-Yves Olivier and his role in a series of behind-the-scenes deals between the apartheid government and African countries in the 1980s.

Born in Algeria, Olivier made his money in the 1970s and 1980s, first as a cereal merchant and later as an oil and coal man, working in countries that few of his contemporaries would have anything to do with. He built a network of connections across the continent that included presidents, US diplomats and rebel leaders such as Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

With an impressive cast of talking heads that includes Pik Botha, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mathews Phosa, Thabo Mbeki, Chester Crocker and Congo-Brazzaville President Dennis Sassour-Nguesso, the film unravels Olivier's story like a John Le Carré novel. Working behind the scenes, Olivier played a part in setting up the talks that ended the war in Angola and led to Namibian independence.

This led, in turn, to the negotiations that freed Nelson Mandela. Olivier is the only person to have received presidential honours from both the apartheid and democratic governments.

Plot for Peace is a well-crafted, carefully executed true-life thriller set in the world of diplomacy and high-level backroom politics. As Olivier says, grand history "is in fact made up of many little stories", including his own.

• 'Plot for Peace' opens at cinemas today

On the radar

Filmed on location in Namibia two years ago, and starring Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, the trailer for Australian director George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road finally landed at this year's Geekfest extravaganza Comic Con, and looks like it could be one of the biggest films of next year. To see why one of the industry's most important testing audiences is raving about its epic scenes of "vehicular action", watch the trailer on YouTube.

• Jamie Foxx will play boxing bad boy Mike Tyson in an upcoming biopic written by Boardwalk Empire creator and Wolf of Wall Street writer Terence Winter. Thanks to digital technology and his youthful looks, audiences won't have to worry about whether or not the 47-year-old Oscar winner can pull off his transformation into the young world champion Tyson of pugilistic legend.
• Ever wondered what the life of an international arms dealer is really like? You think it is all Nicolas Cage in Lord of War? Turns out it is more like that of a dishevelled, vodka drinking travelling salesman with a camcorder, as evidenced in a new documentary about Victor Bout, the man known as the Merchant of Death. Bout supplied arms to a score of infamous regimes in the 1990s before he was arrested and imprisoned a few years ago. The Notorious Mr Bout, a documentary directed by Tony Gerber and made using 20 years of Bout's home footage, will be released in the UK this week.

Tymon Smith