Although Nick Broomfield is best known for making documentaries such as Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, in the last few years he’s moved into fiction filmmaking, such as Ghosts and Battle For Haditha. Now Variety reports he’s got a new one up his sleeve called The Catastrophist, which is set to star Steve Coogan, Stephen Dorff and Canadian rapper K’naan.
Like most of Broomfield’s work, it’s gonna try and have a bit of a social conscience, as it’s a love story set against the decolonisation of the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, based on Ronan Bennett’s book. While actually shooting in the Congo is too dangerous, Brromfield still wants to shoot in Africa and so is planning to film in neighbouring Tanzania.
This is an unusual choice, as the country has very little filmmaking infrastructure, and it will be the first foreign movie made in the county since Howard Hawks’ Hatari! in 1962. No matter where a film is acutally set in Africa, productions normally head to South Africa or Kenya, which have a developed film industry, but Broomfield had success going to Jordan to film Battle For Haditha – another country which doesn’t have a big filmmaking background – and believes he should have the same experience in Tanzania. He first had came into contact with the country last year while making a documentary about an albino football team, and was impressed by its filmmaking potential, and so now plans to go back.
It should certainly be a bit of an adventure when the film crew and stars turn up in the small mining town of Mwanza, which will certainly never have seen the likes of it before.