One of the most interesting documentaries shown during this International Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), is Empire Of Dust by director Bram Van Paesschen. It’s an on site investigation on the relationship between the Congolese and the Chinese, as shown through their efforts to build a road between two major cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2007, indeed, China and Congo signed a massive resources-for-infrastructure deal with 40-120 billion dollar projected revenues.
Van Paesschen focuses on two employees of the China Railway Engineering Company (CREC): Lao Yang, the company’s Head of Logistics, and Eddy, his Congolese translator. They visit construction sites around the country, showing us the picture of a project marred by cultural misunderstandings.
Moreover, Van Paesschen is from Belgium, who under King Leopold II subjected Congo to one of the most brutal colonizations in history. Empire of Dust is a day-by-day account of globalization at work, as Filmaker Magazine puts it.
To film the material he needed, the director had to face many challenges. First of all the country is deeply troubled, with social disorders and a high rate of poverty. And then there’s the cultural gap. He explained: “I first wanted to make a documentary about two Chinese people working in the mining business, two brothers. But during the process of filming, they threw me out because they got pressure from the Chinese community and the Congolese government. They were operating in a grey zone between legality and illegality with the mine, paying off government officials all the time. But luckily they were setting up camp with the China Railway Engineering Company (CREC), so I asked their spokesman [if we could film there]. And he said, ‘Yeah, of course. If you get the permission from the Congolese Minister of Internal Affairs’. Normally it’s impossible, because [the Minister] thinks of himself very highly. And he kept me waiting in the waiting room for three days. [...] But when I finally went in, we made a friendship and [he agreed to let me shoot]. After a week though the site manager was already pushing us out. So I flew over a Chinese friend from Brussels, and he smoothened out the relations in the camp so we could stay for a month longer. So it was a really stressful shoot, the most stressful I’ve ever had“.
Read the whole interview with Van Paesschen here.