Blood in the Mobile
There’s the price that you pay for something in the store and then there’s the other price, the hidden price, the price that everyone pretends isn’t real.
This challenging, at times gritty documentary by director Frank Piasecki Poulsen goes deep behind the gloss, glamour and convenience of mobile phones and reveals a price so shocking that it is near paralysing.
Our phones and other gadgets are powered by what are called ‘blood minerals’ – substances sourced in mines the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Profits from the sale of these minerals fund a war of incomprehensible scale that most consumers are only vaguely, if at all, aware of. Many minerals are involved, but this film focuses on cassiterite, a mineral used for producing tin. Poulsen decends into a notorious, illegal Bisie mine in Kivu, Eastern Congo, which makes the ninth circle of hell seem like a holiday camp.
His own journalistic ’mining’ turns up stories of extreme poverty, child labour, bribery, extortion, prostitution, murder and brutal rape routinely used as a way of ensuring submission to the regime and the continued supply of cheap labour. During the last 15 years more than 5 million lives have been lost in the war and an estimated 300,000 women have been raped. This will continue as long as armed groups can make money by selling minerals to Nokia, Intel, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Nintendo and others.
It is a strong, disturbing film with a disappointingly weak call to action: write to the manufacturer and tell them you don’t want blood minerals in your phone. Anyone who’s ever written a letter of complaint to a global corporation will already know the futility of this – a futility amply demonstrated by Poulsen’s attempts to get a straight answer out of his own phone company, Nokia.
Only a sharp blow to manufacturers’ bottom lines will once and for all stop this deplorable practice. Nothing short of a global general strike amongst the 5.3 billion of us who have mobile phones seems likely to make an impact. Anyone up for a series of International No Phone Days?
Blood in the Mobile
(Dogwoof, 2011)
Running time: 82 mins
Cert (UK): 12A
Director/Narrator: Frank Piasecki Poulsen
- This review appeared in Geographical magazine circa February 2011
