Dag Hammarskjöld is a true hero of recent Swedish history. He was secretary general of the UN in the 1950s and thanks to his efforts the decolonization process in Africa was launched. This made him a few enemies, especially in the Belgian Congo, where the decolonizing spirit led to the independence of the Katanga region.
The filmmaker Per Fly wanted to remember this man who is one of the key figures in Swedish politics in Hammarskjöld. He fights for peace, a film that has screened at the BCN Film Fest and will hit Spanish screens next Friday. Actor Mikael Persbrandt plays the Swedish diplomat, who died in a plane crash in Africa in 1961 in circumstances that have not yet been fully clarified and who posthumously received the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I did a meticulous job to honor the character, but it was complicated because I didn’t want to turn him into some kind of superhero, I needed him to be recognized as a human being, so that viewers could see him face to face. It was necessary for the emotions to flow,” explains Persbrandt in an interview with La Vanguardia during his time at the BCN Film Fest.
The film team found a way to present a “very relatable” Hammarskjöld thanks to the script that shows the character’s loneliness and also his attitudes as a diplomat and his way of acting at the UN General Assembly in a very controversial and political moment. difficult”.
The gestation of the film has been developed over ten years, because the scriptwriters have tried to reach the final consequences of the questions surrounding Hammarskjöld’s death: “The UN opened an investigation in 2017, which has been integrated into the film, the most reliable thesis is that he was murdered.”
Also, Hammarskjöld. Fight for Peace raises the possible homosexuality of the diplomat: “We saw that we had to introduce that aspect of the character in the film because otherwise we would not have done our job well,” says the protagonist of the film.
The film presents Hammarskjöld as a man who lives alone in his huge house in New York, a meticulous and at the same time brave worker who suddenly receives a visit from a friend from his youth in Sweden. There was nothing but chemistry between them in the past because homosexuality was punishable and the UN Secretary General put his work before anything else.
“The letters that he had exchanged with a couple of friends suggest that Hammarskjöld was probably homosexual but that he did not live his sexuality, at the time there were rumors about it and it is even known that the FBI set a trap for him to try to catch him with a young man, a situation that is shown in the film,” concludes Persbrandt.
