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How to Steal a Country

A film by Rehad Desai, co-directed by Mark Kaplan

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How to Steal a Country from Icarus Films.

“It's been almost 10 years of unabated looting.” — Investigative journalist Thanduxolo Jika

HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY opens like a classic thriller, with investigative journalists meeting anonymous whistleblowers in a parking garage. There, they receive a hard drive filled with hundreds of thousands of explosive files and emails implicating Jacob Zuma’s South African government in a massive corruption scandal.

Director Rehad Desai (Everything Must Fall, Miners Shot Down) chronicles how the three Gupta brothers, once small-scale peddlers, cultivated relationships with Zuma and other ANC figures, and parlayed them into massive profits. The brothers were involved in everything from a US$100 billion nuclear deal with Russia, to graft at the state-owned railway and power companies. Tens of millions were stolen from money earmarked for rural development and funneled into a lavish Gupta family wedding. Journalists investigating this corruption were targets of a disinformation campaign accusing them of being neo-colonialists supporting white monopoly power.

Eventually, the journalists are vindicated, and a state inquiry is called into “state capture”—a massive corruption scheme involving the Guptas, Zuma and his government, and international finance and consulting firms.

HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY serves as a warning on how multinational companies and ruthless entrepreneurs can co-opt democracies for their own profit.

“This is a devastating reminder of greed, complicity and the outright theft of a nation’s resources.” —City Press

IDFA 2019
Doc Edge New Zealand 2020 (online)
Durban International Film Festival 2020 (online)

93 minutes / Color
Closed Captioned
Release: 2020
Copyright: 2019

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This DVD is sold with a license for institutional use and Public Performance rights.

Subject areas:
South Africa, Communication, Economics, Economic Sociology, Ethics (Business), Government, Journalism, Media Studies, Politics, Political Science, Sociology (Economic)

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