You probably know that we have a movie club. We call it Tshukudu
Movie Club, because our house can be found if one takes the second
exit of the Tshukudu Roundabout, and turns right at the petrol
station. We don't bother much with street names in Eastern DRC.
So every Tuesday, members of the Tshukudu Movie Club get together
in my living room (depending on the chosen movie and everybody's
individual leave situation, we may be 3 or 15), and watch the week's
selection.. We have very serious rules, established categories and
real voting in the facebook group.
Although they don't form a separate category, we managed to watch
a few African-themed movies in the past months. My recommendations
are below.
- Out of Africa. A classic. I've seen it much before I'd even thought about coming to Congo, and I remember how I was touched by the bittersweet love story, and the bittersweet Robert Redford. I admired, although didn't understand, the baroness, who grew up in Denmark, and one day she decided that for her freedom is to... have a farm in Africa. Watching it now, from Goma, what strikes me most is how it shows that little it shows from the unprepared, often insultingly ignorant point of view of a European traveller. In any case, it helps us remember just how much of a stranger we really are here. And Kenya is so stunningly beautiful. So is Robert Redford.
- God Loves Uganda: Upsetting documentary about a group of American missionaries, exporting their values and particularly their religious beliefs to Uganda, not considering for a split second just how strangers they will be there. The movie is disturbing, and not only because it was shot in a country where homosexuality is against the law, but also because it cruelly shows what immense energies blind faith can move, and put in the use of goals the outsider can't understand.
- Virunga: Probably my favourite of the five, an engaging documentary about the Virunga National Park, the endangered mountain gorillas living there, and the rangers who work in the park and protect it – and sometimes die for it. There are many armed groups operating in and around the area; the network of their interests and alliances are quite hard to understand. The region is extremely rich in natural resources, therefore it's not unusual for some big oil (or other) company of the developed world to come around trying to make use of the utterly complicated and absolutely not transparent, or simply non-existing public administation, and of the vulnerability of the park. The movie gives an overview of this complex, sometimes hopeless struggle, shows a glimpse of the life of the gorillas and the rangers (and they would deserve a movie of their own!), and you get to see Goma!
- Lumumba: for advanced users only. It shows the short political career of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with that, the last days of the colonial Congo. It doesn't hide the opinion (fact?) that the political powers of the time often used the inner conflicts of the former colonies to their own benefit, and if they didn't see any, they would easily leave the country and the people to struggle on their own.
- Hotel Rwanda. If you are not very familiar with the history of the Rwandan genocide, you can get a classic war movie with some hiding and an everday hero. If you are vaguely familiar with the story, or have read the memoirs of Roméo Dallaire (the force commander of the UN peacekeepers during the genocide), you may have an idea of what you're going to see, although it doesn't try to fully describe the bloodbath. It couldn't, but it's not the purpose either. And if you have been to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, you may find this movie disturbingly realistic, because even thought the streetview has changed in the past 20 years, some details can be still recognized, and the Hotel des Mille Collines still stands and operates where it used to in 1994; with expats sitting by its pool, drinking their cocktails, looking down on the valley, the country of the thousand hills.
And of course there is always The Lion King, we're watching that next Tuesday. There will be banana bread. Maybe apfelstrudel - come by! ;)
