"Can you be white and African?"

Mugabe and the White African is a covertly-filmed documentary about a white Zimbabwean family's stand against Robert Mugabe's land reform campaign. Co-director Andrew Thompson reveals how the film was made against enormous odds

Standing their ground … Ben Freeth (in green cardigan) and Michael Campbell (in beige cardigan) on their farm in Mugabe and the White African

Michael Campbell is one of a handful of white farmers still left in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned land for redistribution to poor black Zimbabweans. Since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife among the majority of the country's citizens. But Campbell, 74, refuses to back down. Our film, Mugabe and the White African, follows Campbell and his family's unprecedented attempt to take Mugabe to an international court on charges of racial discrimination and violation of their human rights, against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections.

It was always our intention to make a really cinematic film, as well as a powerful documentary. So we needed to shoot on a large format: a departure from the hidden-camera news footage that more commonly comes out of Zimbabwe. Images and sound are so important in adding texture and layers to a place, and we wanted the audience to feel really immersed.

But having big cameras, a sound crew and proper recording devices did make it even harder to shoot in a country where filming is, to this day, banned (the only exception appears to be for al-Jazeera). We risked imprisonment or worse if caught – one reason why we get so little news coming out of the country. What makes our film special is that it offers the only insight the outside world has of what is going on behind Zimbabwe's closed borders, of life lived under Mugabe's regime.

We were filming during last year's contested presidential elections, so security was even more tense than usual. On the ground this meant you couldn't go far before you hit a roadblock manned by the interior security force. It was pretty hairy getting about. We always used different borders on each of the five trips, different transport, and I slept in different safe houses every night to keep moving. Our golden rule, which I was only forced to break once, was to always travel separately from the equipment.

We got away with it - just. After every trip there would be the inevitable knock on the door of Michael Campbell's farm. The security forces were never more than two days behind me.

I'm quite used to working in hostile environments. I've previously made films in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Gaza. But filming in places like that is considerably more straightforward than shooting in Zimbabwe. In Gaza, the buck stops with Hamas. There, if you've got their blessing, you can stand on a street corner and film. In Zimbabwe you couldn't. There was no rule of law. You were not supposed to be there, full stop. Zimbabwe was an infinitely scarier country to shoot in. You were never quite sure who was your friend or enemy. Mugabe had instilled such mistrust in people.  

One of the white farmers we followed said you could be standing in church with someone who, the next day, would turn up at your farm with an iron bar in his hand and a gang of armed thugs by his side. There was constant fear all over the country. It sounds odd to say it, but in Gaza people felt and looked happier. They smiled. Life went on. But in Zimbabwe, it had stopped. It was not like in the rest of Africa, where you could have people selling mangoes and tomatoes on the roadside; it was like a country that had shut down. There were just shadows. This was the picture in 2008 and, according to most reports, the situation has only worsened.

Zimbabwe is a former British colony, and so there's a tendency to presume the white farmers shouldn't be there. Part of what appealed to us about making this documentary is that it wrestles with some uncomfortable questions. At one point, Michael Campbell's son-in-law, Ben Freeth, asks, "Can you be white and African?" Well can you be white and American, or black and American? Of course you can. Racism is a terrible thing, whether it's perpetrated by whites or blacks.

This film is ultimately about human rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are universals we should all care about. Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible dictator, responsible for serious human rights abuses, and those who oppose the regime are abducted, beaten, tortured and killed.

And what does the world do? Currently, very little. African leaders seem loath to criticise one of their own and the west sits on the fence, paralysed by the fear of being called neo-colonialists or racists.

Zimbabweans need the west not to wobble on sanctions. They need them to stick to the stance that the power-sharing government, the so-called unity government, is anything but. It is a government of disunity that shouldn't be formally acknowledged. To say that we in the west recognise the government in Zimbabwe would be a catastrophic mistake for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans trapped in their own country. It would send out all the wrong messages that Mugabe is someone we could do business with. If this film can go some way towards bringing to an outside audience the injustices going on inside Zimbabwe – and, more importantly, get something done about it – then I feel that we as film-makers will have succeeded.  

Guardian