Man to Man

1870, Scotland. The anthropologist Jamie Dodd brings two pygmies back from Africa. His purpose is to put a thesis to the scientific establishment of the day: that these people are the link between man and ape. In Edinburgh the two are caged, measured, exhibited. In time Dodd sees that his thesis is wrong; the people in front of him talk, think, laugh, grieve. The question then is no longer science but who will agree to take them home. Régis Wargnier directs; a hundred and twenty-two minutes, with Joseph Fiennes as Dodd and Kristin Scott Thomas beside him. The science the film describes was real: in nineteenth-century Europe human beings were put on display, and that racial ranking counted as official knowledge. The film sets it out to show it, not to endorse it. It opened the 2005 Berlinale.