Alex Ritman In upcoming documentary “Bribe, Inc,” one of the key characters is a whistleblower known as Figaro, so named because he requested journalists contact him via an ad placed in French broadsheet Le Figaro.
Like most whistleblowers on camera, he’s shown via a silhouette and with a different voice to hide his identity. But such was the fear over him being caught and the implications of what he was revealing to the camera, that the filmmakers went even further, blurring his already silhouetted image to obscure the shape of his head and body, quarantining his interviews from the rest of the media for safety and not just digitally altering his voice, but getting someone else to speak his words verbatim.
For a nice dramatic touch and a hat tip to TV conspiracies, the voice they used was that of William B. Davis, better known as the “smoking man” in “The X-Files.” Directed by multiple Emmy-winning documentarian and investigative reporter Peter Klein, “Bribe, Inc” initially follows the work of acclaimed Australian journalist Nick Mckenzie, who — with the help of Figaro and a tranche of emails — broke the story about corruption in Monaco-based company Unaoil, run by the Ahsani family.
Mckenzie revealed that Unaoil had been serving as middle men for giant global corporations, using what was described as an “industrial scale bribery operation” to help them win multi-million dollar government-funded projects from oil-rich nations.
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