Daniel Nelson

Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream

Image by Elephants Dream

It focuses on the deeply religious Henriette in the post office, where sackfulls of undelivered letters accumulate dust; Lieutenant Kasinga, mostly filmed seated and apart from his colleagues in the ruins of a brigade HQ that itself was burnt down a couple of years previously; and two railwaymen, Simon and Ken Nzai.

Hardly any trains call at the station, which has become a soporific place where students revise. The firefighters are the only such force in a city of perhaps nine million people and are hampered by an absence of hydrants. There’s so little activity in the post office that a customer asks if it’s real.

It’s a fair question. These services hardly exist. The staff grumble at their lack of pay (post office workers are shown collecting 10 per cent of their salaries for August – that is, August two years before) and conditions (a fireman looks at his Canadian boots and comments, “First it gets worn by a white man, then it is our turn”).

“How far can we carry on in this state?” asks Henriette. “Will there be a time when things are sorted out? And when? Will we always be in such conditions?”

But loyalty and determination are unquenched: “I cannot give up now until I eat the fruits of my perseverance,” she says.

A faint glimmer of hope feebly enters these marginalised institutions –along with suits and limos as the politicians and diplomats graciously and briefly turn up for a ceremony –  with a plan to commercialise the post office to enable it to handle electronic transfers.

And there’s a sudden burst of activity for the firefighters as they are called out to tackle a blaze, to the jeers of onlookers when water only trickles from their hoses.

For the most part, however, this is an almost poetic contemplation of disappointment and lassitude, filmed with a steady camera and an absence of background noise. It’s far from the reports of conflict and rape that we usually get from Congo, and equally far from the alternative vision of music and musicians. But it’s an important, rarely seen slice of Kinshasa life, and bittersweet delight to watch.

·         Elephant’s Dream is showing at 4pm on 4 July at the Genesis, 93-95 Mile End Rd, London E1 as part of the East End Film Festival. Info: http://www.eastendfilmfestival.com/ Genesis 780 2000

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