Blood in the Mobile

The Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen goes to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to ask where the minerals in his own phone come from. He reaches the Bisie tin mine in North Kivu, a closed area held by armed groups, where much of the digging in the narrow tunnels is done by children who stay underground for days at a time. His second stop is Nokia’s door, where a company that advertises its social responsibility cannot guarantee that none of its minerals come from Congo. The figures the film rests on are estimates from human rights organisations: more than five million dead over fifteen years and more than three hundred thousand women raped. Poulsen keeps his attention on the chain rather than the catastrophe, because what lets the war continue is that the ore can be sold.