Ben Affleck Set To Direct 1800's-Set Film KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST About The Plunder of The Congo
Ben Affleck has jumped on board a new film project to direct titled King Leopold’s Ghost, “a fact-based drama about the plunder of the Congo by Belgium’s King Leopold II in the late 1800s.”
The project is being written by Farhad Safinia (Apocalypto). Affleck is also producing through his Pearl Street Films banner alongside Martin Scorsese and Emma Koskoff-Tillinger.
According to Deadline, Safinia is basing his script on the Adam Hochschild book: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. The film “covers an atrocious piece of history that is every bit as bad as the subtitle infers. Set at a moment when European countries were racing to find ways to carve up the natural resources of Africa, Leopold became the world’s richest man with billions stashed in secret bank accounts by gaining private ownership of the Congo Free State, and inserted a mercenary army to cruelly plunder rubber and ivory. He forced the locals to harvest it. Those who refused were dismembered or worse, and the book estimates that as many as 8 million were killed in this ruthless pursuit. The book was previously the basis for a 2006 documentary.”
This film is an account of the “Congolese who defied Leopold II and fought back. Their heroic plight sparked a daring and unlikely alliance between a black American missionary, an English investigative journalist and an Irish spy that shone a light on the horrors and gave birth to the first human rights movement. Once photographs were made public, Leopold’s charade of spreading Christianity in the heart of darkness was exposed as a greedy ruse, and the king was assailed by the likes of Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold’s “civilizing mission” led to writing Heart of Darkness.”
This sounds like a story that will make for a great film! It’s also a very different kind of project for Affleck to take on as a director. I’ve enjoyed the films that he’s directed, the last of which was an adaption of Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night. This latest project came out of his personal passion for the region. Affleck founded Eastern Congo Initiative, an advocacy and grant-making initiative focused on working with and for the people of eastern Congo to spur economic and social development and increase the quantity of public and private funding to support those goals.
He’s been working on King Leopold’s Ghost for several years and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the film turns out.