Plot for Peace tells an ‘untold story’. The whole world knows that Nelson Mandela was finally freed from prison in 1990 and that in 1994, after South Africa’s first democratic elections, he became President Mandela. The apartheid regime was no more. Many people in South Africa, black and white, had struggled over many years to end the system. War in the ‘front-line states’ against the South African armed forces was a ‘hot’ feature of the Cold War during the 1980s and around the world thousands of anti-apartheid activists fought to isolate the apartheid regime. There have been many books, films and plays telling stories about individuals in the struggles and more recently about Mandela himself, but few have attempted to explain how the battle was won without a massive conflagration and the devastation of South Africa itself.
Plot for Peace tries to give a different perspective on the events of the 1980s, focusing on one man, a ‘fixer’ who was able over several years to bring together the leaders of many of the major players in the global struggle and to establish at least the possibility of a peaceful, negotiated end to apartheid. Jean-Yves Ollivier is a remarkable man who was awarded an honour by the new South African government almost without any publicity. For some of those who did know what he had done he was the mysterious ‘Monsieur Jacques’. His story has now been put together in a film narrative in which, as far as possible, Ollivier and the leading figures he worked with tell the story in their own words.
Here the filmmakers discuss how the documentary came about:
and here Jean-Yves Ollivier discusses what he thinks about sanctions and the need to negotiate in a range of other global conflicts:
The Case for Global Film 