En route pour le milliard
In the summer of 2000 Ugandan and Rwandan troops fought a devastating battle in Kisangani. The International Court of Justice sentenced Uganda to pay one billion U.S. dollars to the civilian victims. After almost twenty years of waiting in vain, some of them set out for Kinshasa to enforce their legal claim. The physical and theatrical power of their mission both drives and radiates from this film.
Dieudo Hamadi has given the women and men he is about to follow down the Congo a visually confident and assured exposition. Gathered on an inky black stage, they look at us and sing: of blood spilled, of money forgotten. Then the march of the maimed sets itself in motion, on crutches, with prostheses, past the nearby pits of the dead and out into the country. Every metre covered is an act of rebellion. When the procession of beggars, who rightly won’t tolerate this designation, finally climbs the stairs of the National Parliament, iconic scenes of Soviet revolutionary cinema seem to shine through. But the crowd that is moving here is different. Its individual bodies push back with all their weight both against the casual shrug of the shoulders of political routine and the carelessly rounded calculations of loss and equivalent value of the arithmetic of war.
(Sylvia Görke, DOK Leipzig)
This film was made in the midst of much obstruction from various sides. Yet it magnificently shows how people wounded and handicapped as result of the atrocities of a six days war in their city Kisangani gradually accepted their conditions and subsequently made the best of it. They decided to head to their country's capital to claim the money that the government received in order to restore their living conditions. In the meantime the audience sees how people determined by their being victims take their lives in their own hands again and grow out to men and women celebrating the victory of the opposition in the elections. In their misery they increasingly showed up well. This is something found in many religions: that God inspires people to struggle for justice for themselves and for others.