Makala

OUT 2 february / CERT u / 96 MINS Director Emmanuel Gras cast Kabwita Kasongo, Lydia Kasongo

With his YOUNG family subsisting on barbecued rats in a village in the southern DR Congo, twentysomething Kabwita Kasongo chops down a gnarled tree, builds a charcoal pyre and schlepps his heavily laden bicycle over 30 miles to market in Emmanuel Glas’ award-winning documentary. Keeping his camera near the resourceful, dogged and sweetly naive Kasongo as he toils, heaves and barters, Glas captures the poverty and corruption of everyday life in one of the world’s most dangerously dysfunctional countries. A couple of incidents in transit and in the bustling town seem stage-managed, but African poverty has rarely been shown in such unrelenting close-up and we should not look away. DP