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MAKALA | FILM REVIEW
****
Dir: Emmanuel Gras
Starring: Kabwita Kasongo
(U, 1hr 36 mins)
Hypnotic, slow-burning and yet, remarkably tense, Makala is a unique piece of work, all the more remarkable for the fact that its released here in the UK in the midst of Oscar Season, when heavyweights such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro are duking it out for audience attention, even amongst the arthouse crowds, realistically this film’s primary audience. But this documentary wasn’t a prize-winner at Cannes for no reason.
The title means ‘charcoal’ in Swahili, and we follow Kabwita Kasongo, a charcoal salesman who lives a hardscrabble existence somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo with his wife and children. The first scenes are of him chopping down a tree, which he turns into charcoal; next we see him take the arduous journey of bringing what looks like 40kg+ of charcoal on a makeshift bike across dirt roads to a town 50km away to sell. Filmmaker Emmanuel Gras stays purely in the present, focusing the entirety of the film on Kabwita’s arduous, Sisyphean struggle. We never leave his side, and the man looks as if he’s aged 10 years by the film’s end, lines appearing on his face, eyelids drooping as exhaustion take holds. Though there is no contextualizing information in the film (it is exclusively of the moment), we can only assume that this is a regular routine for Kabwita. Makala shows, it does not tell. What it shows is the crushing repetition of poverty, of its traps and pitfalls, and of the world that’s built up around it – a world where bad luck is a fact of life rather than a mistake of coincidence.
Makala is also, subversively, a very beautiful film. Gras’ camerawork is deliberate and carefully-framed, capturing the changing landscape of Kabwita’s journey with lyricism and an exquisite eye for composition. In fact, it is such a visually arresting film that it’s difficult to believe it was not at least partly staged (certainly one assumes that the film must have surely helped Kabwita at times with his journey). Such a film always runs the risk of aestheticizing or exoticizing poverty for the pat-yourself-on-the-back benefit of a Western audience, but that’s not the case here. Instead, we remain completely with the film’s central figure, never above him, never being pleaded to sympathise with him. It’s never anything less than entrancing, with the film’s slow rhythms and repetitive actions recalling the works of say, Bela Tarr, but set here within a documentary context to depict the sheer boredom and struggle of such an existence. That existence is very clearly communicated.
Only one scene towards the end is a concrete misstep, in which Kabwita visits a church and engages in a frenzied night of worship before heading home. It’s easy enough to respect the sincerity of his faith, but this is the sole section of the film which looks very deliberately staged – it as if the other worshipers were asked to stand in particular spots to generate aesthetically pleasing compositions, the one scene where the camera openly intrudes on reality, where the rest of the film it feels as if the camera is sitting beside reality, observing carefully. That sole misstep takes away from what is otherwise a thoughtful, even painful, but moving depiction of subsistence living.
words Fedor Tot
Out now