Saviour Complex Review: HBO’s latest documentary series is directed and produced by Jackie Jesko. The genre is true crime with T. Griffin as the music composer. The cinematography is by Daniel Hollis. It is produced by HBO Documentary Films and Latchkey Films.
The documentary has three parts. The three parts of the documentaries are titled “God Doesn’t Call the Qualified, He Qualifies the Called”, “Cast the First Stone” and “Reap What You Sow”, respectively.
– HBO’s Saviour Complex Review Contains Mild Spoilers –
Saviour Complex Review
Saviour Complex is a story of revelation and power. It dissects the headlines on Renee Bach and how she played God with Ugandan children with the finesse of a documentary, building the series with nuanced interviews and real-life instances. The docu-series plays on themes of racism, caste, religion, privilege and politics, to name a few. The key focus, however, of this documentary is that one has the full picture and you will continue to be who you are after watching this but, with the much-required information.
Saviour Complex tells the story of Renee Bach and her Christian NGO called Serving His Children and the subsequent campaign launched to undo the effects of Serving His Children called No White Saviours.
Bach’s story goes back to when she was just a teenager and when she visited Uganda on a missionary trip, she figured that her calling was to help the people of Africa. By the age of 19 Bach was determined and had founded her NGO called Serving His Children. Initially, this organization was dedicated to providing the poor families of the locality (Jinja) free meals. Soon enough it moved to providing free medical treatment for children and community support.
Although the NGO had a staff, it did not have doctors to help with the said medical treatments. So how were these treatments taking place, you ask? Well, they were based on the instinctual expertise of Bach. This white woman did not have any kind of training in medicine or surgery but, very well went ahead with offering medication and even performing surgical operations (in one case, even a blood transfusion) to help these malnourished children in Africa. All of this led to something foreseeable, Bach being held responsible and accountable for her actions.
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Saviour Complex takes us through all of these and then some more where we see how Bach had made an impact and managed to save lives. But the damage she did where hundreds of children died under her care was too far gone to ignore. We see how the No White Saviours campaign got involved in this process and to date, their stance against Bach’s activities remains one of their most notable contributions to society.
The documentary series shows us things from the lens of colonial and privileged background to the feeling of superiority psychologically specific to certain people. The white saviour and the complex that comes to boost one’s ego on the ladders of empathy of compassion is boldly highlighted in the series. But it does not take away from the fact that the true-crime story also had a rainbow part to it lying in intentions and goodwill. We even see mothers testifying how during times Bach proved to be useful to help them.
Saviour Complex: Final Verdict
After a long while HBO has provided us with a rather ambiguous story that leaves us with a lot of food for thought. Saviour Complex has shined in ways unexpected and is surely a sleeper hit release of this year in the category of documentaries.
You can watch Saviour Complex now streaming on Max.
Meanwhile, you can let us know in the comments below what you think of this latest HBO documentary series.