THE AMBASSADOR Director Returns With True Crime Doc COLD CASE HAMMARSKJOLD

After building a name for himself as a documentary prankster par excellence with his features The Red Chapel - in which he posed as an experimental theater director to gain access to North Korea - and The Ambassador - in which he literally bought diplomatic credentials to see if he could travel to central Africa and return with a briefcase full of blood diamonds - Danish provocateur Mads Brugger returns with what sounds like a much more conventionally structured doc but one which could be no less shocking.

What if, Brugger asks, the 1961 death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was not the accident it has long been ruled to be but was, in fact, an assassination? And so begins Cold Case Hammarskjold.

If this really is true, if The Secretary of The United Nations really was assassinated by a sinister nexus of big powers working in collusion, it could be the most important and shocking story ever told.

It is John Le Carré meets Graham Greene meets Robert Ludlum, i.e. the most intense political thriller possible. The geopolitical reverberation of Dag Hammarskjöld's death in the jungles of Ndola in present day Zambia can still be heard and felt today, yet somehow his untimely death has always been overshadowed by the clear cut assassinations of iconoclastic heads of states, such as Gandhi, John F. Kennedy and Oluf Palme. But now a critical mass has assembled itself, and the time to make an indisputable argument for the likelihood, that Dag Hammarskjöld's death was not a simple plane crash - which several investigations have concluded - is ripe. Now, thanks to Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish man working for Sweden's national foreign service in Africa, who began investigating the case himself, local, African stories can be told, and these statements lead to a whole other and much more disturbing conclusion about what caused the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. At the same time, Göran Björkdahl, working with other researchers, has data mined archives at universities and ministries around Europe and elsewhere, unearthing documents and witnesses that underpin his thesis; Dag Hammarskjöld was murdered. Following in the footsteps of Göran Björkdahl, from Stockholm, to London, Moscowand Washington, to the jungles of Ndola and ballistic laboratories of Los Angeles, not to forget tracking down a sinister private intelligence network once headquartered in South Africa, "Cold Case Hammarskjold" will present itself as a captivating and intriguing political thriller, with the ice-cold and mathematical structure of a perfect logarithm.

To the cynic in me one of the most amazing things here is that the very premise posits a world in which the UN was once relevant enough that killing its head would have been considered by some to be a political necessity. But given the current state of things throughout Africa it's entirely possible that - if true - many of the global ills of today trace themselves back to Hammarskjold's death and, with him, the death of his very progressive approach to dealing with post-colonial Africa's political issues in a positive way. And regardless of all that, Brugger is a mad genius and the chance to see this cannot come soon enough.