Blood in the Mobile by Frank Piasecki Poulsen

Blood in the Mobile is a film with a mission. A mission to raise awareness of the fact that most likely all of our electronic devices contain minerals financing the most terrible war on this planet: the war for the mines in eastern Congo. Almost certainly the laptop this review is being written on has “blood” in its chip, as does the mobile phone lying next to it.

Director Frank Piasecki Poulsen makes it his personal mission to track down the origins of his Nokia phone’s innards, if necessary all the way down into the Bisie mine in Kivu province, Congo, where the mineral cassiterite is won. He pursues his goals in the most confrontational way imaginable: appearing everywhere with camera, exploiting the insecure reactions of his opponents. But maybe real discoveries need a certain amount of determination and recklessness, two qualities Poulsen definitely can claim to possess. At the same time he addresses the fact that nobody can just step out of her/his restrictions, even when the people at Nokia try their best to obscure the company’s responsibility.

Yet the aggressive insistence he presents is shot back at the audience, as we are forced to follow him on his personal quest into the heart of darkness. To say the images taken inside the mines are a tremendous journalistic achievement is to say much too little. But because of the way they are treated in the film, accompanied by a menacing musical underscore and fades to black, one cannot shake off the feeling that they are also fetishes of an obsessed missionary.

Through his permanent presence in the images Poulsen demands an equally personal response from his viewers, as the “problem” virtually concerns us all. Every user of any electronic device whatsoever plays a part in this paradigmatic example of globalization. To call this “complex” would be a euphemism, as this is an argument primarily used by representatives of the corporations involved to justify the slowness of their actions.

All that said, there is an important point to make: even though I might disagree strongly with some of the aesthetic and journalistic decisions of this movie, I can assure the makers that it did not leave me unaffected. I wish it to have some kind of positive effect even though I doubt that the way chosen is a promising one. Thinking of the horror the people of Congo have to suffer, all I can hope for is to be proven wrong.

by Nino Klingler

www.bloodinthemobile.org