Park City posting on 1.29.19: “Mads Brugger‘s Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Magnolia, 8.16) is one of the most original-feeling investigative docs I’ve ever seen.

“It begins as an investigation into the 1961 plane-crash death of UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, which happened, we gradually learn, at the hands of colonialist bad guys. The film is about how Brugger, who casts himself as a kind of whimsical, not-quite-Hercule-Poirot-level investigator, and colleague Goran Bjorkdahl gradually uncover what happened.”

Cold Case Hammarskjöld “represents a sideways shuffle approach to discovering long-buried bones and nightmares. It is, in fact, an eccentric film, and yet the things it discovers are real and beyond ugly. It’s the mixture of curious whimsy and malevolent apartheid schemings that gives Cold Case Hammarskjöld a tone of spooky weirdness.

“Suffice that Brugger comes to believe (and in fact persuades) that Hammarskjold’s plane was shot down by Belgian-British mercenary pilot Jan van Risseghem, who was apparently doing the bidding of some ugly fellow who were angered by Hammarskjöld’s sympathy for African nativist independence movements.” — posted from Park City on 1.29.19.