“Nobody Else Can Give You Permission”: C. S. Nicholson on The Discoverer of the Discoverers

In The Discoverer of the Discoverers, Scandinavian filmmaker C. S. Nicholson ventures into the thorny terrain of colonial legacy, authorship, and complicity. The short documentary, which has garnered major awards at festivals such as Apricot Tree, GIFF.Docu, and Japan Indies, begins with an uncanny inversion of historical narrative: in 1548, an ancestor of the Kpatènon family in West Africa is said to have “discovered” the Portuguese. This local legend is recounted to a European film crew—Nicholson among them—with both gravity and irony.

But Nicholson's documentary doesn't simply reconstruct a folkloric tale; it interrogates its own existence. As a white European making a film in West Africa about the legacy of a man who invited colonial forces ashore, Nicholson knowingly positions himself as both observer and participant in a power dynamic that resists tidy moral conclusions. “Although it can be argued that it’s problematic for a White European to shoot a film in a Black African country,” Nicholson writes in his director’s statement, “in this instance it’s not entirely clear who’s using who.”

A formally daring work—replete with slowed-down imagery and a haunting score sourced from archival recordings, operatic fragments, and colonial-era compositions—The Discoverer of the Discoverers is as much about myth and the fog of memory as it is about history. It complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized, asking its viewers to sit with contradictions rather than resolve them.

The film’s unorthodox style and refusal to take sides have polarized audiences and programmers alike. While it won top honors in West Africa, South America, and Asia, it faced widespread rejection across Western Europe. And yet, it continues to spark conversations wherever it plays.

We sat down with Nicholson to discuss the film’s origins, challenges, and their take on documentary ethics in an era of ideological rigidity.

This film was clearly not an easy one to get made. What was the starting point for you?

I was researching another story when I came across a footnote about the Kpatènons, the family in the film. Their tale upended a few assumptions of mine—about the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and globalism. I needed to know more, and to know for myself. I don’t know why. Deciding on the subject matter for a doc is only a rational choice on the surface. You can rationalise it after the fact, but it’d be superficial or even dishonest to do so.

As to the how, because Europeans covering stories from Africa is so inflamed, funders and producers wouldn’t touch the project. But I’d worked in TV long enough to establish contacts. A cinematographer and three sound recordists had sufficient faith in the idea to work without pay. By doing as much as possible myself, and working various jobs to save up money for everything else, I managed to scrape a short together. It only took six years!

You’ve mentioned in your statement that it’s not entirely clear “who’s using who.” How did the Kpatènon family see your presence and the film itself?

When I first met the Kpatènons, they were about to enthrone a new head of the family. That I was the first European to meet the newly appointed clan leader was seen as an echo of Kpatè’s encounter with the Portuguese, and a sign that my documenting the ceremony was the will of his spirit. To be fair, this may not have been the clan’s only consideration when granting me access. Due to Kpatè’s role in history, his descendants still enjoy great symbolic power. This relevance would only be solidified by the inclusion of their legend in a documentary shown internationally.

What were the key challenges in making the film?

The first hurdle was financing. Awarding a grant to a Scandinavian director who intends to make a film in West Africa is considered inappropriate. I think the Norwegian funding bodies saw themselves as protecting the underrepresented and underprivileged. That’s a laudable position—though one might argue it’s a bit peculiar for them to tell a fellow White person he can’t shoot a film in a Black country, making themselves European arbiters of who can and cannot tell stories from Africa.

An extension of this challenge was securing festival selections. Not in general, but in Western Europe. At first I thought maybe the film wasn’t good enough. But then came screenings in Benin, Nigeria, Cape Verde… The Discoverer of the Discoverers was the closing film and won at a festival in Accra. It picked up another award in Bahia. I’m not trying to brag. It’s just to say that when every submission to festivals in Portugal, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and so on was rejected, quality control wasn’t a factor.

And yet, the film has been winning awards all over the world. Why do you think it remains controversial in certain corners?

Perhaps it has more to do with Western Europe corresponding, roughly, to the countries that had colonies and were drivers of the Atlantic slave trade? The Discoverer of the Discoverers did screen in Berlin, but the only reason it slipped through the cracks was because a South American festival decided to arrange an edition there! It tickles me that it took White Europeans in charge of finances and curation to make this short, little no-budget film—which has not once been impugned over its narrative, politics or accuracy—controversial.

Meanwhile, Black History Month Norway invited me to do a Q&A. A few underground festivals in Italy and France, as well as the Brussels Independent Film Festival and later Cannes International Film Week, recognised that there’s no reason to feel threatened by The Discoverer of the Discoverers. Now you can stream the short on Whush.

What are you most proud of in this film?

That the short ended up surprising me. When I watch it now, it’s as an audience member more than the filmmaker. The film opened up in the edit in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. There’s a poetic quality, for lack of a better term. Some sort of internal logic revealed itself. Certain things aren’t terribly clear, yet the narrative doesn’t attempt to explain them. The atmosphere remains compelling somehow, and I don’t think audiences feel a need for further explication.

At one festival screening I caught an audience member googling “Benin.” I love that about our age of information. You can afford to be less micro-informative. It’s easy to worry you’re not communicating clearly enough, and to err on the side of spoon-feeding the viewer. I’m very pleased with the balance struck.

Do you think this balance is something you can repeat in future work?

I’m finding it hard to repeat, now that I’m working on my next film. It’s a feature that’s shaping up to be more conventional. The footage hasn’t taken on a life of its own yet.

Can you tell us about that next film?

My concert film I Wonder If I’m Singing What You’re Thinking Me To Sing is currently doing the festival rounds. It stars Michael Gira, the driving force behind the band Swans, playing solo inside what may or may not be a church. I facetiously like to say it’s psychedelic, but in black-and-white.

I’m also getting close to locking the edit on a feature doc I’ll be calling A Stranger Has No Eyes. It’s a follow-up of sorts to The Discoverer of the Discoverers. This second instalment follows a descendant of Francisco Félix de Souza, one of history’s most infamous slave traders. Like Discoverer, it explores how we come to terms with the legacy we’re dealt.

You’ve clearly had a long journey toward documentary. What originally brought you to filmmaking?

I knew I wanted to be a writer or make films by the time I was in my teens. A local secondary school offered a course in film and TV production. I got in, and made a short doc about an international noise collective that, as unbelievable luck would have it, was also based in my small hometown.

My graduation film was a fiction short that caused headlines in the local newspaper when the violent, climactic scene—in which I amateurishly used real blood—was screened at a children’s film festival by mistake.

After some detours into philosophy and screenwriting, I gradually realised that my passion lay with nonfiction. Those stories have something fiction lacks: Roots in reality. They’re not just the make-believe lint in your own shallow little navel. Nonfiction will always be bigger than you.

What do you think the future holds for documentary—and cinema at large?

I suppose AI is going to be a disaster, especially for fiction. How to justify paying actors, cinematographers, et al. and not using AI when everything’s make-believe anyway? Nonfiction doesn’t have that problem, but won’t emerge unscathed.

Audiences might get an even larger appetite for “the real” once AI has invaded their spaces with its aura of unreality. But doubts about what is truly “real” and what’s fake will infect the documentary viewing experience. Perhaps it’ll ruin it altogether. I’ll keep making my films as long as I can, without AI, like an acoustic guitar player long after the advent of the amplifier. A Luddite to the very singularity!

The Discoverer of the Discoverers is available to stream on Whush and Vimeo.

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