The Grab
Nile Inas’ vision for ‘The Grab’ could have been anything from a documentary to a docudrama, borrowing the ambiguous qualities of both genres. At times, the film felt more like a bloated pitch for a series that was never going to get made. The film begins with some specific land related anecdotes primarily about Zambian land sales and the African landscape. However, they elaborate using contrived images that appear too extreme to be real and defy conventional wisdom in otherwise credible speeches.
‘The Grab’ is both a multimedia overkill presentation and a dark suspense movie that tells the viewers to keep their eyes on the prize and think in broader terms. The messages of the film were condensed, and part of the story’s dramatization is handled by a group of investigative reporters including Jim Steele led by Nate Halverson who is an award-winning reporter and received additional support from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
In introducing the thesis statement of the movie he says, ‘the governments of the world including America are buying huge tracts of land for food and water security’ and it is at this junction that too many points are connected using talking heads, news archives, photographs of hidden and closed circuit video cameras, and drones.
“The Grab” begins with one of the lead characters, a journalist named Halverson, who has come across “The Trove,” which is a collection of secrets that revolve around the infamous mercenary Erik Prince, and is seen getting concerned about its safety. At the final film, there is a loud and frantic appeal about several governments, capitalism and its institutions before appeasing a few organizations and people that seem to have helped their clients recover some right over land and water.
One has to feel that the harshest criticisms of The Grab relate back to how Halverson was able to narrate his story, as inviting as it is when placed in context, Halverson often reveals himself as a charismatic narrator, a well versed one if I may add. In this case, it is the connections that Halverson’s narration provides between himself and the Trove that really shine within the breadth of this film. It is difficult, even disappointing, to shake one’s head and attempt to scrub their eyes out at the same time, although everything does seem a little bit out of context.
In The Trove’s´ extensive papers, Halverson’s narration evokes peaceable settlement documents tracing Prince’s involvement as a link of Blackwater fame, which developed land grab in suitcases style in Africa and especially Zambia for Blackwater associates and the Chinese Frontier Services Group.
The Trove’s contents are assumed to be too sensitive to be released. For instance, in a failed 2021 visit to Zambia, Halverson and his other journalist colleagues were taken hostage by the airport security who detained the journalists’ passports. They later learned that all the journalists had been labeled enemies of the Zambian nation, but the reasons for that course of action remain vague. “Mistakenly issued” is how they term in that their press passes were issued to them but that description sounds like a cover up in favor of rich commercial land property holders.
Such dizzying looney speculations track and such too do many of the talking points Halverson or his colleagues arise. There are still insufficient particulars to enable an ample description of so many nets thrown wide, especially when the scope of the discussion involves breadbasket Americans who unknowingly sponsored their own dispossession, hapless renters in Zambia bullied out of their homes by armed mercenaries simulating Blackwater soldiers, and Somali fishermen, who turned into pirates after their native waters no longer offered any fish.
Also, there are vague references to things like Chinese jet packs designed for quick escapes and invisibility cloaks for when local populations rise against the CEOs to withdraw them from their dethroned thrones and there is a heavily insinuated claim that Erik Prince and his associates are in business with or were at one point working with the UAE and Sheikh Tahnoun bie Zayed Al Nahyan and his associates. It is still, however, possible to understand how an interviewee speaking as part of one of the talking heads puts it. “In order to tell this story, you have to tell it in a global dimension everything is interconnected.”
Instead of concentrating on three or four specific organizations, individuals or countries, “The Grab” focuses on a continuous sequence of shocking and disturbing points.
In their discussions, perhaps they could have focused more on the plausibility of some of their scarier quotes, for example what are the odds that a Chinese owned company like Smithfield Foods would quit the business of meat exports and as one of the interviewees puts it, ‘Global Samenban is not possible.’ I’d also be interested in getting more answers about the way in which Erik Prince figured out Zambia or what Colin Mann, an ex military hired soldier, means when he says he knows that Prince has a share in Africa’s land because it is I who says so. It wouldn’t have been a bad idea for a few follow-up questions, would it?
“Grab” ends with Halverson and his crew closing the outer doors of Headquarters of the Center for Investigative Reporting based in Emeryville, California. Now, it appears, the onus is on us, the audience, to make up our minds. Had “The Grab” been a longer feature or an episodic series, it is most likely that such diversions as pirates or jet packs would have been included in the storyline. As it is, this particular version of ‘The Grab’ doesn’t even leave the audience with a bad ending.
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