This immersive, slow-burning documentary about a Congolese charcoal maker finds poetry in the punishing, monotonous graft of one man’s trade. Twenty-eight-year-old Kabwita lives in Kolwezi, some 50km from “town”, where he must trek (goods strapped precariously to a pushbike) to sell the charcoal that he has stripped and smoked himself.
Kabwita’s wordless journey is emotionally involving, helped along by Emmanuel Gras’s dizzying camera, which captures the dusty browns of the dirt roads and the pulsing blue of a hot, cloudless sky. Yet it’s hard to know what exactly it is about this work (or, indeed, this man) that the film finds compelling, beyond its inherent physical strain.
