Martin Hasenöhrl

The Benevolent Dictator

A Viennese Jew who left Austria in 1938 under the Kindertransport scheme, Norbert Abeles became a British colonial civil servant in Africa in the 1950s. Now in his nineties, he lives in Malawi, where he remarried, after working many years for organisations such as Unesco, but also African despots. The filmmakers film the present day, without recourse to archive material, and create a tension between the testimony of this previously abused child, who had to toughen up to survive, and images of his current life.