Mads Brügger made his name internationally with the 2009 documentary The Red Chapel, where he and his crew infiltrated North Korea posing as a theatre troupe. His follow-up, The Ambassador, is either performance journalism or hobbyist espionage, depending on whether you’re one of the privileged Westerners at whom the film is targeted, or one of the Central African Republican bureaucrats the film also takes aim at.

The Danish filmmaker uses shadily acquired credentials to insinuate himself into the CAR’s lucrative blood diamond economy as a “freelance diplomat,” then peels back layer after layer of corruption and injustice at all levels of the CAR’s government and industry. Never moralizing or hand-holding, The Ambassador is an audacious and darkly funny look at capitalism run rampant in a part of the world that global powers often treat as a commodity.