King Leopold's Ghost | Ben Affleck

[Cremildo]

Ben Affleck will direct King Leopold’s Ghost, a fact-based drama about the plunder of the Congo by Belgium’s King Leopold II in the late 1800s. One Community, which co-financed Just Mercy, is financing development with an option to co-finance the film. Farhad Safinia (Apocalypto) is writing the script.

This film is an account of the Congolese who defied Leopold II and fought back. Their heroic plight sparked a daring and unlikely alliance between a black American missionary, an English investigative journalist and an Irish spy that shone a light on the horrors and gave birth to the first human rights movement. Once photographs were made public, Leopold’s charade of spreading Christianity in the heart of darkness was exposed as a greedy ruse, and the king was assailed by the likes of Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold’s “civilizing mission” led to writing Heart of Darkness. [SOURCE]

[vegeta88]

Sounds like a really interesting film and definitely a topic not much talked about in the mainstream. Count me in as interested!

[imsounoriginal]

This sounds interesting. I think my only exposure to anything remotely associated with this story (aside from reading Heart of Darkness back in school) is, funnily enough, the Alexander Skarsgaard Tarzan movie from a few years ago, which uses Leopold's conquest of Africa as the historical backdrop for the movie.