Zimbabwe slams Kidman movie

ZIMBABWE’S government claims that a recent Hollywood film starring Nicole Kidman was a “CIA-sponsored” campaign targeting President Robert Mugabe and has vowed to fight that “cultural and psychological” onslaught on Harare.

Acting Information Minister Chen Chimutengwende said The Interpreter about an octogenarian African leader who plans to address the United Nations General Assembly to ward off indictment by the International Criminal Court was a thinly-disguised swipe at Mugabe.

Directed by Hollywood veteran Sydney Pollack, the film stars Sean Penn and Kidman a UN translator from the fictional African nation of Matobo whose life turns topsy-turvy after she unwittingly learns of a plot to assassinate the country's hated leader before he addresses the UN.

"The names of the main character in the film are Shona," Chimutengwende said, referring to Zimbabwe's main ethnic group to which Mugabe belongs.

"The film talks about an African president going to the United Nations and our president is going to the UN next week so the connection is so obvious," he said.

"It is part of a CIA-sponsored fight against us in the political, economic, cultural and psychological spheres," he said.

"But we will defeat them and we will defeat neo-colonialism. We have defeated a powerful enemy before which was colonialism," he said.

The film got poor reviews in southern Africa, especially in South Africa, where critics lampooned it as a caricature of Hollywood's perception of an African dictator.

The head of Zimbabwe's state-run Media and Information Commission Tafataona Mahoso told the government-controlled Herald newspaper the film was "typical of the propaganda format."

"This is typical of US tactics used during the Cold War," he said.

Foreign critics and domestic opposition parties accuse Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980, of being responsible for the country's devastating economic decline and for stifling democracy.