The Recce
Director
Daniel Mann
United Kingdom, Germany / 2026
15 min.
/ Original version
Original language
English
In 1904, European leaders of the Zionist Organisation secretly surveyed the Ugandan highlands as a potential “New Promised Land” for the Jewish people. Supported discreetly by British Colonial administrators, who described East Africa as a barren and blank imperial canvas and were eager to rid England of its Jewish population, one Jewish delegate began mapping the terrain, climate and life in Uganda toward a new Jewish settlement. What occurred on that mountain that led the explorer to vow never to return remains unknown.
Drawing on present-day film location scouting and an email exchange with an Ugandan scout, The Recce meditates on cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. Through the recce, land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another.
The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form.
Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. His work often interrogates the material politics of land, particularly in the contexts of colonialism and nationalism. His films have been screened at festivals, including the Berlinale, IFFR, Visions du Réel, Cinema du Réel, DocLisboa and the ICA in London. His recent film, Under a Blue Sun, received the International Jury Prize at Documenta Madrid. Mann is also the author of the books “Occupying Habits” and the forthcoming “Hot Location: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier”, and a lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.
Director Daniel Mann. Cinematography Uganda Fixers. Editing Daniel Mann. Producer Daniel Mann. Production company Daniel Mann (London, United Kingdom).
Films: 2009: Complex. 2011: Future Diaries. 2015: The Birdman. 2018: Motza El Hayam / Low Tide. 2019: Salarium. 2021: The Magic Mountain. 2024: Mitahat Le Shemesh Khula / Under a Blue Sun. 2026: The Recce.
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