Avec le vent
2013 · 36m · Belgium
Directed by Raf Custers
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In Congo's Katanga province, multinational mining companies extract copper and cobalt for the globalised economy while neighbouring villagers breathe polluted air and drink contaminated water. The documentary dissects the unequal relationship between rural Congolese communities and the mining industry operating on their land.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects righteous anger from a Congo mining doc, so Custers does something weirder—he refuses the catharsis, lets the contradiction just *sit* there, which somehow makes the complicity feel worse than any montage of outrage could.
Custers positions this essay within a lineage of politically rigorous documentary form—Farocki, Kiarostami's later work—using restraint and structural precision to force the viewer into uncomfortable witness rather than comfortable sympathy.
The decision to hold on landscape shots long enough that the mining machinery becomes almost geological, part of the terrain itself, is what makes the exploitation feel inevitable rather than exceptional—a single formal choice that reframes the entire argument.
Reviews
Le film de Custers va donc loin dans ses interrogations, à l'instar de la réalité qui n'est elle-même pas unidimensionnelle. La force de ce film est de tenir compte de cette complexité tout en interrogeant avec la même inexorabilité tous les acteurs, que ce soit au Nord ou au Sud, en Occident ou en Orient, sur leur part de responsabilité dans une situation qui ne pourrait être considérée autrement que comme une catastrophe humaine.