Goethe Institut will this evening screen “Blood in the Mobile” a film by Frank Poulsen at the Goethe-Institut Centre in Kiyovu from 6p.m. The 82-minute documentary produced in 2010 and directed by Frank Poulsen, a Danish born film producer, depicts the role of mobile phones in fuelling the raging armed conflict in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. While many countries have been accused of scrambling for the abundant mineral wealth in DRC, what people do not know, according to the documentary, is that big Western international companies are culpable of exacerbating the war that has claimed the lives of five million people and destabilised the region. Poulsen’s film reveals the dirty little secrets of the manufacturers of mobile phones. They need the mineral Coltan for electronic components, which is there in plenty in lawless eastern part of DRC, controlled by gangsters, warlords and rogue army units taxing every facet of this bloody industry. Mining and mobile-phone use is linked to financing murder, mass rape and intimidation. The documentary traces the journey of the blood minerals, from illegal mines controlled by armed groups and children who work under horrible conditions to the big mobile phone companies. Poulsen has made a tough investigative film about this, demanding that his own mobile phone supplier owns up to how much coltan it is buying from the DRC. He travels out there to see the conditions. The mine turns out to be a chaotic shanty-town on a mountain honeycombed with unsafe tunnels, and policed by warring factions of scary, trigger-happy bullies. The mining and gangster-ism have grown hand in hand. The raw material is shipped overseas, smelted into tantalum and it is at this point that the big corporations buy it, not bothered about its origin. The mobile phone company is deeply uncomfortable about this subject. Poulsen wants the company to guarantee that it’s not buying conflict minerals and thereby financing the war in the Congo. The company cannot give him that guarantee. “Blood in Mobile” is a film about our responsibility for the conflict in the Congo and about corporate social responsibility, or lack of it for that matter.
