“We all carry a piece of the Congo in our pockets – our smartphones.“
YvesNdagano, COLTAN-FIEBER: CONNECTING PEOPLE
In Coltan Fever: Connecting People, a former child soldier and miner returns to the places of his childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, he confronts his past and, despite resistance from his former cap-tors, seeks to expose the complex entanglements of the global commodities trade.
Yves Ndagano was a child soldier and prospector in a coltan mine in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In COLTAN-FIEBER: CONNECTING PEOPLE, he travels back to the places of his childhood for the first time in order to recapture his own traumatic story at the original locations. Using a wooden doll as his proxy, he is able to express the unspeakable things that happened to him. During the film shoot, it becomes clear that the struggle for raw materials still dominates the region. Ndagano meets his kidnappers, he returns to the coltan mine and to the place where he was made a perpetrator. He tries to uncover the connection between his fate and the global commodities trade. Finally, he also confronts his family, who had rejected him for years – then the Nyiragongo volcano erupts during filming… Yves Ndagano confronts this internal and external destruction with a concept that is underestimated in Europe: repair. The belief that things can be restored and new things can emerge from them.
“And so Coltan Fever: Connecting People has become a fascinating reversal of the narrative perspective between the global North and South. (…) ‘I don’t feel good when I experience my own story on the screen, but I just have to spread it – here in the Congo and here in the West,’ he says.” Dorothea Marcus, Theater Heute, March 2022
WITH Yves Ndagano, Ernestine M’Kajabika, Léontine M’Kajabika, Esperence, Ghislain Chimanuka, Julio, Juvenal Muderwa, Ladisi Kajabika Mukabaha, Michael Pietsch, Gianni La Rocca, Patrick Joseph, Laurenz Leky | DIRECTOR Jan-Christoph Gockel & TD Jack Mahamba Muhindo | CAMERA TD Jack Mahamba Muhindo & Eike Zuleeg | SOUND Tavis Jean-Batiste | MONITORING & DRAMATURGY Christoph Otto | PUPPETRY Michael Pietsch | MUSIC Matthias Grübel | LIGHTING & CAMERA ASSISTANT Shabani Abdalah | EDITING ASSISTANT Kim Lêa Sakkal | COLOR CORRECTION Eike Zuleeg | INTERNATIONAL TEAM Bangladesh: Tanvir Nahid Khan, Asaduzzaman Farid, Hossain Jibon, Probaho, Asif, Nahian Azad Shashi, Jidni, Ishtiaq Anonnya Banik & Mohamad Rasel | Belgium: Gianni La Rocca, Marynka Seron, Clelia Robaye & Riccardo Mazzetto | Berlin: Chao Liu, Oscar Linders, Veronika Vorobiova | China: HUA Dong | Ghana: Bernard Akoi-Jackson & Elolo Bosoka | Colombia: Tiago Seither Afonso | Lesbos: Atifa Akbari, Yaser Akbari, Refocus Media Lab | Niger: Maman Iro Abdoul Aziz, Abdoulaye Abdoul Rachid, Mohamed Abdoulaye, Fatoumata Koyta, Gonga Son | Rwanda: Yves Kijyana Peter, Nyatanyi Gael, Irakunda Liliane, Justin, Uwajambo Prince Oleg | SET ASSISTANCE DR Congo Muhindo Nathalie | SET ASSISTANCE Germany Claudia Kaunzner | RECHERCHE Laurenz Leky, René Michaelsen, Magdalena Heffner | TRANSCRIPTION Sebastian Cirhakarhula Namugurwa & Maren Flintrop | TRANSLATION & SUBTITLE Eleonora Gunn, Kathrin K. Liess, Sebastian Cirhakarhula Namugurwa, Rifat Afrin, Kim Lêa Sakkal | PUPPENVERSAND Claudia Kaunzner | FORMBAUU PUPPEN INTERNATIONAL Thomas Opatz | FAHRER DR KONGO Mumbere Moise | BUCHTHALTUNG Jacqueline Friedrich | PROJEKTBEGLEITENDE THEATERDOKUMENTATION COLTAN-FIEBER Christian Hennecke |PRODUKTION peaches&rooster | COPRODUCTION afroTopia e.V.; R.P.D.Fi. Goma, DR Congo, Theater im Bauturm Köln, Schauspielhaus Graz | SUPPORTED BY the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste, the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, the Rhineland-Palatinate / Rwanda Partnership Association, Shift Phone & Schauspielhaus Graz
Based on the theater project COLTAN-FIEBER by Jan-Christoph Gockel & Ensemble, a co-production of the Theater im Bauturm – Freies Schauspiel Köln with the Theater FALINGA and the Festival Récréâtrales, Ouagadougou/Burkina Faso, the Tarmac des Auteurs, Kinshasa/DR Congo and the Goethe-Institut Kigali/Rwanda.
http://peachesandrooster.de/production/coltan-fieber-connecting-people