Coltan-Fieber: Connecting People

Yves Ndagano is a former child soldier and prospector at a coltan mine in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. In “Coltan Fever: Connecting People,” he travels back to the places of his childhood for the first time to reclaim his own traumatic history in their original settings. Using a wooden doll as his proxy, he is able to express the unspeakable things that happened to him. During the filming it becomes apparent that the struggle for raw materials still dominates the region. Ndagano encounters his kidnappers, he returns to the coltan mine and to the place where he was made a murderer. In this way, he tries to uncover the connection between his fate and the global trade in raw materials. Finally, he also confronts his family, who had met him with rejection for years – then the volcano Nyiragongo erupts during the filming …

Yves Ndagano confronts these inner and outer destructions with a concept that is underestimated in Europe: repair. The belief that things can be restored and something new can emerge from them.