In 1904, European leaders of the Zionist Organisation secretly surveyed the Ugandan highlands as a potential “New Promised Land” for the Jewish people. Supported discreetly by British colonial administrators, who described East Africa as a barren and blank imperial canvas and were eager to rid England of its Jewish population, one Jewish delegate began mapping the terrain, climate and life in Uganda towards a new Jewish settlement. What occurred on that mountain that led the explorer to vow never to return remains unknown. Drawing on present-day film location scouting and an email exchange with an Ugandan scout, <em class="film">The Recce</em> meditates on cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. Through the recce, land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another. The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form.