A classic piece of filmed investigative journalism with the nerve-jangling urgency of a real-life spy thriller, Undercover: Exposing the Far Right arrives at Dutch festival IDFA following its dramatic aborted launch in the UK. Chronicling the work of the London-based anti-extremist, anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate, Havana Marking’s documentary was originally set to world premiere at the London Film Festival in October, but the screening was pulled at late notice due to safety concerns. It has has since aired on British television, but IDFA is hosting its big-screen festival premiere.
Marking, whose award-winning track record includes Afghan Star (2009) and Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Cyber Attacks (2016), criticised the LFF decision, claiming “fear is its own form of censorship.” While the cancellation was arguably a testament to the power of her film, it was also a depressing reflection of the charged political climate in post-Brexit Britain, which has witnessed as string of violent anti-immigrant street riots in recent months. With Donald Trump heading back to the White House, and right-wing populist movements on the rise globally, this conventionally shot but politically timely piece of reportage feels likely to generate more news headlines and audience interest.
Marking’s central focus in Undercover is Hope Not Hate’s two-year investigation into the Human Diversity Foundation, a shady underground network that promotes “race science” and “human biodiversity”, a widely discredited fringe area of academia dedicated to proving the genetic supremacy of the white race. The brave undercover double agent is Harry Shukman, who adopts the alias of “Chris”, a wealthy investor with racist sympathies. Hopping between London, Tallinn, Warsaw, Athens and other cities, Shukman gradually infiltrates the group, forging friendships with key players including suave magazine editor Matt Archer, aka Matt Frost, as well as Danish researcher Emil Kierkegaard and Erik Ahrens, a controversial German social media strategist with links to the right-wing extremist party AfD.
Though fraught with tension and risk, an uneasy mood reinforced by Tara Creme’s throbbing score, Shukman’s detective work mostly involves hushed meetings with well-spoken white supremacists in fancy restaurants. But darker, violent, menacing forces are never far away. Stealth footage shot at related events and political rallies are rife with ugly racial slurs, sinister plans for mass ethnic cleansing, Nazi salutes, Holocaust denial and lurid fantasies about Muslim men anally raping women who express anti-racist views. As is often the case, many of the white male racists in this film seem to share a visceral sexual anxiety towards brown-skinned men. It may be a pathetic cliché but it remains reliably, hilariously true.
Woven around Shukman’s investigation, Undercover also includes glimpses of Hope Not Hate’s wider hinterland: their multicultural management team, their family backgrounds, their stoic reaction to routine legal challenges and death threats. A key subplot here is the group’s long-running campaign against “Tommy Robinson,” the alias of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a high-profile British far-right activist who co-founded the anti-migrant party EDL. Yaxley-Lennon has been repeatedly arrested and jailed over the last decade for assault, fraud, contempt of court, public order offences and other crimes. But he also has a huge online following and media champions among the world, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Donald Trump Jr.
Marking’s film concludes with a happy ending of sorts: an elegant sting operation in which Shukman teases out the identity of HDF’s shadowy financial backer from his wary, tight-lipped targets. He discovers that the organisation received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businessman who made his fortune from the dating website Adult FriendFinder. When Hope Not Hate made these findings public last month, Conru pulled his support for the group, claiming they had misled him about their “non-partisan academic research”. Frost/Archer has now left the organisation too.
The end credits also include a welcome note of grimly hilarious comedy: a statement from Ahrens protesting that HDF’s obsession with racial purity has been misrepresented by the film, and that they merely aspired to open an exclusive “gentleman’s club”. In related news, but too late to be included here, “Tommy Robinson” lost his latest legal case in late October and was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court after repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee. These are small victories but, in the dawning era of Trump 2.0, it is hard not to conclude that much bigger battles lie ahead.
Director: Havana Marking
Cinematography: Havana Marking, Oliver Ridley, Tom Turner
Editing: Kristy Jane Miller, Ross Hazell, John Thirlby
Music: Tara Creme
Production companies, world sales: Marking Films Inc (UK), Tigerlily Productions (UK)
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In English
95 minutes
