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.

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination.

The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate.

Electromobility is a great promise of the future. The Democratic Republic of the Congo with its vast cobalt and lithium deposits supplies two of the essential building blocks for the necessary batteries. “Machini” focuses on the lives of those who bear the brunt of the exploitation of such dirty raw materials for our “clean” energy.