Blood in the Mobile

Have we all become too fixated, ethically speaking, with local: eating seasonally, keeping it in the neighbourhood? This brave awareness-raising doc heads to war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo in search of ‘blood minerals’. They’re used in mobiles and, according to the UN, all the armed groups in the DRC profit from their trade. And the conflict is savage: one veteran correspondent wrote last year how he is haunted by the things he saw and heard, including children forced to eat their own parents’ flesh.

Director Frank Piasecki Poulsen puts himself in front of the camera (a little too insistently at times) paying a visit to the HQ of his phone supplier Nokia. Asked about the supply chain of the minerals cassiterite and coltan, the execs just deliver marketing-speak. With suicidal levels of reckless courage, Poulsen flies to the DRC and a cassiterite mine – not long after a massacre. Descending into the mine with a child worker, it’s like he’s plunging into hell; the footage is extraordinary. It’s enough to make you reconsider that new smartphone.