Empire of Dust

This week, the Open Doek Festival (20 – 29 April) kicked off in Turnhout, while Leuven is getting ready for the 8th edition of the International Documentary Festival DOCVILLE (27 April – 5 May). Both programs house a large selection of Flemish titles, ranging from Daniel Lambo’s Dry Branches of Iran to Berlinale attendees Anton Corbijn Inside Out andAsparragos.

For the eighth consecutive year, DOCVILLE highlights the best documentaries and awards prizes in various sections. This year, Flanders is well represented in its national competition with more than ten short and feature-length film titles.

Manu Riche & Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance and Bram Van Paesschen’s Empire of Dust have been invited to the Etat d’Esprit section of the Visions du Réel International Film Festival (20-27 April) in Nyon, Switzerland. Both documentaries will compete for the festival’s Audience Award, worth more than €8,000.

Both documentaries are set in the Democratic Republic of Congo but take entirely different approaches. In Snake Dance, which premieres internationally in Nyon, director Manu Riche and English writer Patrick Marnham embark on a cross-cultural journey that retraces the events leading up to the making of the H-bomb. Through the writings of art historian Aby Warburg, Snake Dance composes a filmic essay of a world that now more than ever is on the verge of complete destruction.

Sarah Vanagt’s The Corridor, Bram Van Paesschen’s Empire of Dust and Tim De Keersmaecker’s Aperture were recently selected for the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (8-13 Nov). All three films are travelling the festival circuit extensively and again testify to the vibrancy of documentaries and video art from Flanders.

Bram Van Paesschen’s Empire of Dust kicked of its festival tour with selections at DOK Leipzig and Kassel but more recently the film was also confirmed for IDFA’s Panorama section. Empire of Dust is produced by Bart Van Langendonck for Savage Film (Bullhead, The Co(te)lette Film). In the documentary wo men representing two different cultures clash in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The result is an endless, harsh but absurdly funny rollercoaster of misunderstandings, as Yang is introduced to the Congolese way of dealmaking.

A record-breaking haul of eleven documentaries and four docu projects from Flanders have been selected  for this year’s IDFA, the international Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (16-27 November). Works from Jeremy De Ryckere and Kristof Bilsen, who recently graduated from RITS and NFTS (UK) respectively,  are shown in the Student Documentary competition. The other entries feature in the Reflecting Images: Panorama, Paradocs section and IDFA pitching Forum.

Both Jeremy De Ryckere’s The Heir and Kristof Bilsen’s White Elephant compete for the IDFA Award for Best Student Documentary, worth €2,500. The Heir tells the story of a father, Raf, and a son, Dominique, and their relationship to their passion: horse racing, a long family tradition. White Elephant is a documentary about the Central Post Office and its employees in Kinshasa, DR Congo. This grandiose relic of a colonial past has trapped its employees in a frozen timewarp from which they are planning their escape. Last year the Award for Best Student Documentary went to the Flemish doc What’s in a Name by Eva Küpper.

When Bram Van Paesschen set out for the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010 he was expecting to make a film about Chinese mineral traders, following up a previous documentary on the lives of African miners. Things started to go wrong almost as soon as he arrived and he was forced to improvise the result, Empire of Dust, suggests he struck gold after all.

Text: Ian Mundell

Van Paesschen first thought of travelling to Congo when he was asked to come up with a social documentary for the Flemish TV channel Canvas. ‘I never had this dream of going to Africa,’ he recalls, ‘but I saw pictures of the mine workers and I thought the scenery was very impressive and the situation was interesting. So I proposed it to them.’

The channel accepted and Van Paesschen was soon on his way to the mineral-rich Katanga province, in the south of Congo. ‘It was like landing on Mars!’ he says of that first experience. But he soon found his feet. ‘You have to be open and patient. You have to be a bit quiet and observe a lot, then you can grasp the situation quite easily.’

The resulting film, Pale Peko Bantu Mambo Ayikosake (Wherever There Are People, Problems Are Never Lacking), follows a group of men who dig out minerals by hand and sell them by the sackload to official buyers, or smuggle them out on the black market. His plan in returning was to explore the other side of this business, following a pair of brothers from the Chinese community who buy minerals from the miners.