He offered Amin the ability to basically call the shots on the film, making him the director of his own portrait, more or less, Schroeder saying he was especially overjoyed when he was able to get the dictator telling the cameraman what to film. For 25-minutes the director talks about his jumping between fiction films and documentaries (sometimes using the documentary as a way to research a fiction film he may be working on) and how he came to make this one in particular.

The new Blu-ray betters it but this still holds up very well.ДЄ fairly basic edition overall but it does at least come with a lengthy interview with director Barbet Schroeder. There are a few marks left behind, along with stray hairs here and there as well, but the restoration work has been wonderfully thorough, especially surprising for the time, 15 years ago. Also surprising is how good the source materials look. Colour saturation isnвЂ™t too bad, and black levels are pretty good, but I sometimes felt the image leaned a bit too much in a greenish territory.Д«ut despite any of those problems there is a decent amount clarity here, a bit of a surprise coming back to it. Grain has been left in though the limitations of the format do limit how itвЂ™s delivered making compression obvious and noisier when itвЂ™s upscaled. Yes, long shots can look a little muddy but close-ups are impressive. The image is surprisingly sharp and the detail levels are strong. Criterion had a tendency at one point to deliver a lot of their documentary releases in interlaced presentations but havenвЂ™t gone that route here, giving us a progressive one. This older standard digital transfer was taken from the original 16mm Ektachrome original print and since the film is in a standard aspect ratio the image has not been enhanced for widescreen televisions.Дespite its age the presentation still holds up reasonably well.

The Criterion CollectionвЂ™s original DVD edition of Barbet SchroederвЂ™s General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait presents the film in the aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on a single-layer disc.

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