Coltan, also known as blood ore, mined in various Central African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, is essential to our technological uses. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo makes it the cornerstone of Katasumbika, a manifesto film with a multidimensional approach in line with his previous works. Moving nimbly between historical accounts and synesthetic connections, the director weaves, pierces, sculpts and stitches together images from the present and the past. The archive of Belgian colonial propaganda, whose nasal voices unfold the operations of coltan mining, is shown on the objects themselves, projected onto the moving basket in which women sort seeds while singing. This gesture of ‘aesthetic recoding' - in the filmmaker's words - opposes the persistence of colonialism and extractivism with an operation of substitution (from the grain of the archive to the crushed seed). The archive is thus simultaneously the trace of a legacy and a ruin that overshadows the present, from which pockets of resistance can re-emerge. Katasumbika is a work of decolonial re-inscription based on the songs, rhythms, gestures and practices that the colonisers made invisible and erased. It is in this layered construction that seemingly disjointed elements take on meaning and converse with one another: agricultural gestures, work in the mines, a political gathering in a public square for the departure of the UN Mission filmed on the spot, and the vibrant testimony of a survivor of the massacres perpetrated in 2023 by the Congolese army in response to this popular demand. From the opening computer-generated image of coltan to the final, concrete, metallic sound of rock being mined, Katasumbika is a sovereign undertaking of testimonial and memorial reappropriation that bears witness to a reality that no one should ignore: the price of our consumption.

Film written and directed by Petna Ndaliko Katondolo

Subtitles:
English, French
Screenplay: Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Cinematography: Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Editing: Jobu Madibo
Music: Lee Wisert
Sound: Libu Manga Blak, Kaskote Mathe
Production: Maurice Carney (Freind Of The Congo), Stella Ramazani (Alkebu Film Productions)
Contact: Patricia Adra (Alkebu Film Productions)

*Selected for FID Marseille 2025