Daniel Mann

Germany, Great Britain 2026, 15 min
by Daniel Mann

In 1904, European leaders of the Zionist Organisation secretly surveyed the Ugandan highlands as a potential “New Promised Land” for the Jewish people. Supported discreetly by British colonial administrators, who described East Africa as a barren and blank imperial canvas and were eager to rid England of its Jewish population, one Jewish delegate began mapping the terrain, climate and life in Uganda towards a new Jewish settlement. What occurred on that mountain that led the explorer to vow never to return remains unknown. Drawing on present-day film location scouting and an email exchange with an Ugandan scout, The Recce meditates on cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. Through the recce, land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another. The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form. Source of Production