115 min | NR | December 17, 2021 | Greenwich Entertainment
Robert Mugabe is gone after thirty-seven years, and Zimbabwe holds its first open election. Nelson Chamisa thinks he can beat the man who inherited the machine. The vote is the easy part. The count is where they take it from him.
President follows Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, the first since the military removed Robert Mugabe after thirty-seven years in power. Nelson Chamisa leads the opposition against Emmerson Mnangagwa, the former vice president and Mugabe loyalist now wearing the mantle of reform. The film is not really about who wins. It is about the machinery that decides the winner before the votes are counted. Camilla Nielsson trains her camera on the gap between the language of democracy and the apparatus that exists to defeat it.
Chamisa appears as a candidate who believes the rules will protect him and slowly learns they will not. He works the crowds with the energy of a man certain of his mandate. He sits in election commission meetings and watches procedure curdle into obstruction. Mnangagwa appears mostly through proxies and institutions, a presence felt more than seen, which makes the power he holds look total. The opposition lawyers and poll agents fill the frame in the final stretch, and their exhaustion becomes the film’s true subject.
Nielsson works in pure verite with no narration and no talking heads. She earns access to the rooms where the result is contested and lets the camera hold on bureaucrats stalling for time. The editing builds dread through repetition. Each procedural delay lands heavier than the last because the film refuses to cut away to relief. The handheld camerawork stays close to faces during the post-election standoff, and the absence of a score forces the tension to come entirely from what people say and how long they are made to wait.
President understands that an election can be stolen in plain sight through paperwork and patience. The drama is not the ballot but the certification, not the rally but the room where the count is verified. Nielsson does not editorialize because the events do the indicting on their own. She builds a document of how an authoritarian system absorbs the forms of democracy and uses them against the people who trust them. The film leaves the question of legitimacy open and lets the silence answer it.