How to shoot a movie in the Congo

Makala is a film which charts a sin­gle man’s chron­ic strug­gle to earn a crust to live on. Kab­wi­ta is first seen mak­ing char­coal in the Con­golese coun­try­side by felling a tree and then roast­ing it in a pur­pose-built oven. He then bags up the bricks with a view to sell­ing them, yet he has to phys­i­cal­ly trans­port them with the help of a remod­elled bicy­cle across harsh ter­rains. Here direc­tor Emmanuel Gras explains how he found his sub­ject, and the strange rela­tion­ship he kept with him from behind a camera.

“The first time I went to Con­go was way before this film. I went to the east where I met with dig­gers and min­ers who would retrieve ore from the ground by hand. Which is a very risky job. Then I went to Katan­ga which is also a min­ing region, but all the wealth pro­vid­ed from these mines ben­e­fits a small minor­i­ty. So it is a region that is struck by pover­ty. That’s when I saw the coal producers

“I was trained as a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and this real­ly affects the way I work and the way I choose top­ics. They have to be inter­est­ing and they also have to be visu­al­ly attrac­tive. There’s a visu­al idea always which is at the start of every­thing. When I make films I want to cre­ate images that have a mean­ing. With this film, the image of coal pro­duc­ers push­ing bikes was inter­est­ing to me. It all starts with an image. I didn’t ask ques­tions dur­ing the shoot­ing. I wasn’t involved as an inter­view­er. It’s dif­fi­cult to shoot while ask­ing questions.

“I met met with the film’s sub­ject, Kab­wi­ta, one year before we shot it. We spent some time togeth­er, maybe a few weeks. Then we shot the film which last­ed a month and a half. The film­ing start­ed direct­ly after because I was film­ing a man work­ing so I had to see the way he worked. I explained the con­cept of the film to him and I explained my process, so it was all quite clear.

“The idea was not to real­ly film the inti­ma­cy of the char­ac­ter, I want­ed to show the human­i­ty of some­one work­ing. It’s not about the vil­lage, or Kabwita’s rel­a­tives. When we start­ed work­ing togeth­er, he would say what he was going to do in his work and he would also point to things that would be inter­est­ing to film because he had an idea of what I was hop­ing for.

“I want the view­er to actu­al­ly feel phys­i­cal­ly what his work meant. It was a sort of exis­ten­tial and phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence at the same time, which showed tremen­dous amounts of effort over a long peri­od of time. I was impressed by that and ques­tioned: what is the line between shoot­ing and help­ing? There is no sim­ple answer, because we talked, and if he felt too tired we stopped shoot­ing. He didn’t actu­al­ly ask for help. If he required some help, we would stop. And we took breaks as every­one was tired at some point. This work for him is some­thing he does on a reg­u­lar basis – what seems hard to us is some­thing he would do nor­mal­ly. It seemed patro­n­is­ing on my part to help where it was not necessary.

“When you are there in the Con­go, a lot of peo­ple think about the extent of the inter­est you can have with strangers, espe­cial­ly if you’re from a West­ern coun­try like France or the UK. After the film was made I helped Kab­wi­ta build his house. But that came from me. I think all the coal sell­ers hope for some­thing bet­ter, and yet he was not in a sit­u­a­tion where he was think­ing this film would change his life. For me that was sur­pris­ing. For him, he was count­ing on him­self a lot. For me I was sure that it would have been inde­cent to do all this with­out giv­ing help in return.”

Makala is released 2 Feb­ru­ary. Read our review.