Sinister ‘influence’ of Bell Pottinger exposed in new film

NIA MAGOULIANITI-MCGREGOR

And behind this documentary is South African journalist and filmmaker, Richard Poplak, and his co-director, Diana Neille, who cut an investigative swathe through Chile, South Africa, Iraq, and the United States to create this film.

The chief narrator of the film is Bell Pottinger’s co-founder, the late Lord Tim Bell, who, at the time of filming, was very much alive and singing like a canary in a remarkably candid if ethically-compromised commentary.

Though officially a “reputation-management” firm, Bell Pottinger came to be known as a “reputation launderer”, and counted along with its establishment clients like former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, not a few of the shadowy variety, including the Pinochet Foundation and Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

At the core of this South African/Canadian co-production is how Bell Pottinger, at the height of its powers, experienced a massive fall from grace at the hands of an outraged South African public, investigative journalists, and determined opposition politicians.

Speaking after a private screening in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, recently, Poplak, who once described South Africa’s ruling elite under Zuma as having “nuclear-tipped chutzpah [cheek]”, said the genesis of the film was the Gupta Leaks.

“In 2017, the editor of online newspaper Daily Maverick, Branko Brkic, declared he had the ‘mother of all stories’,” says Poplak. It turned out to be the massive email leak which exposed the extent of the Gupta family’s influence over state institutions during the Zuma presidency.

“It felt like our Watergate,” he says.

“What we were looking at was the actual mechanisms under which the state operated. And it wasn’t a parochial South African story, the emails implicated massive multinationals like consultants McKinsey and accountants KPMG – and right in the middle of it all was Bell Pottinger with this massive contract.”

In 2016, Bell Pottinger signed a deal with the now-notorious Gupta brothers. For more than $100 000 (R1.5 million) a month, the package included stoking racial unrest in South Africa via social media, websites, and speeches to distract from large-scale state looting which benefitted the Guptas and their cohorts.

He says he didn’t need much convincing when Neille suggested that they cover the topic in a no-holds-barred, feature-length documentary. They raised R14 million “relatively quickly”, and started to dig. “It gained steam very quickly, although getting the interviews was a long courting process.” There was full disclosure – “I told everyone we interviewed exactly what we were doing.”

Taking two years from the time they “switched the camera on to off”, the film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival recently, includes interviews with FW de Klerk, former United States diplomat Chester Crocker, a host of media and political specialists, and the Democratic Alliance’s Phumzile van Damme, who led the battle to get Bell Pottinger removed from the United Kingdom’s public relations regulatory body after full details of their subterfuge emerged.

“We decided to shoot all our interviewees with their cities as backdrops to serve as a constant reminder of the ivory towers from which firms like Bell Pottinger operate. What we wanted is to have these really powerful men lauding over the city like lords of the universe.”

Of Bell’s eager loquaciousness, Poplak said, “At a certain point, everyone wants to tell their story. Bell clearly wanted to get a whole bunch of stuff off his chest, which was a big break for us. Call it luck or skill or both.

“It’s always a challenge to get people to talk. There’s something ineffably magical about access. Do they speak because I’m a super-handsome dude? Is it because we’re super convincing? I don’t know. And I don’t really want to know. Because if I did, the magic could disappear.

“Shooting was horribly difficult,” he said. “Just the struggle of shooting in a city like London on a limited budget, in limited time, or getting visas to enter Iraq was hugely demanding.”

He said there were emotional hardships, from extreme travel to exhaustion to “difficult yet interesting” subjects. “On our first day in Chile, we realised that our fixer – who arranges locations and interviews – wasn’t up to the job. We had been flown there at enormous expense, and realised we weren’t going to get any interviews. So Diana and I ran around the city of Santiago nailing down interviews on our first day of shooting – without a location. It was insane.”

Poplak, who grew up in Orange Grove and went to King David Linksfield before studying fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal, credits his parents Phillip and Lorna for his curiosity. “Intellectually there was a lot of room to roam,” he said. Lorna became a writer at 70, he said, publishing a book about the death penalty in Canada called Drop Dead. “My mom, the writer! How many Jewish boys get to inspire their parents?”

After working and travelling around the world, Poplak returned to South Africa in 2005, and wrote a book called, Ja, No, Man. “It was a weird, dark comedy about growing up white and Jewish under apartheid.”

Describing himself as a “cultural Jew”, Poplak said he belonged to “the tribe of Jews of Orange Grove”.

“Jews from this part of Joburg have a specific accent and outlook. We grew up in a conservative environment even though some like to pretend the community was liberal.” It bugs him. “This, despite thousands of years of moral teachings that we have as a ballast!”

Poplak said he believed in the need for a religious self-reflection. “I want to start writing about post-modern, 21st century Judaism. There should be an evolutionary process in how we think about our faith. I’m deeply attracted to Bernie Sanders because he’s so Jewish. He comes from one strain of our tradition which believes community, collectivity, and togetherness is important.’

In the light of these ideals, he felt that the Jewish community could have made bigger and better choices.

The Bell Pottinger exposé was an integral part of the anti-Zuma demonstrations around the country in 2017, Poplak said, which included placards condemning the company. “It was enormously encouraging, this rearing up saying, ‘This is enough’. It proved that South Africans value the notion of democracy and sliding back into the darkness of the past isn’t an option.”

And it was a case of enough is enough for global players too. As word of the unethical work emerged and global companies started cutting ties with Bell Pottinger, British public-relations guru David Wynne-Morgan said in Influence, “I predicted Bell Pottinger would be in administration by late September. I was wrong. It was mid-September.’