Blood in Your Mobile: An Interview with Frank Poulsen

Your mobile phone could be funding war in the Congo. It may sound absurd and obtuse but in his new documentary, Blood in the Mobile, Danish filmmaker Frank Poulsen explores to what extent this is true, and whether the blame ultimately lies with the authorities, the manufacturers, or with us, the consumers. Ahead of the film’s screening at Take One Action Film Festival, The Skinny spoke with Poulsen to discuss conflict minerals, and began by asking how aware the public is of the problem?

“What I can tell you is that I didn’t know,” says Poulsen “I knew there was a war in Congo, but I didn’t know that it had anything to do with something I was carrying around in my pocket.” Poulsen follows the trail of the rare metals used in his own mobile to the military controlled township of Bisie in The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children as young as ten are sent down makeshift tunnels in order to extract these minerals, which are then sold on to the West for the manufacturing of essential components in modern electronic technology.

As well as taking the audience deep into these hellish underground mines, Poulsen also visits the lavish steel and glass Helsinki headquarters of Nokia, mobile phone market leaders and the director’s own brand of choice. Poulsen balances his inability to get the company to acknowledge the problem against the incredible dangers of travelling to this war-torn part of the Congo. “I’m a family man and often I was planning on going back home. But at the same time as I was realising how dangerous it was, I also realised that this was exactly the reason why I had never heard about this problem before, because nobody goes,” says Poulsen. “So the more dangerous it became the more important it became to finish this film because somebody has to go and see what it looks like for us to really understand, and we need to understand in order to act on it.”

Inside the Bisie mine, where workers spend up to 72 hours underground at a time, a camera mounted to the helmet of a teenage miner captures some harrowing footage. The first person point-of-view creates an intimacy that only hints at the claustrophobia. “You really feel uncomfortable there,” Poulsen says of the mine. “You feel that everything can collapse on top of you and it’s something that you can’t control in any way. It really provokes your worst fears.” Poulsen utilises inherent cinematic techniques to evoke an audience response that goes beyond simply raising awareness. “If you can hit people in the stomach, so to speak, if you can hit also on the emotions, if you can make them feel something and make them experience something then that can really open a window to a world that’s normally completely inaccessible.”

Quick to highlight Nokia and the other electric giants' awareness of this issue, the filmmaker is sceptical about their willingness to change. “[The big international corporations have] had ten years to try and solve this problem. I think by now we should know that we can’t leave it up to [them] to fix the world and I think the solution is a political one.” Though the EU is currently looking into making legislation in this area, the filmmaker clarifies: “It seems like things are really moving now, but I have to emphasise, because people could get the idea that this has a lot to do with my film, and of course my film was part of it but I have to emphasise that I’m standing on the shoulders of organisations like Global Witness who have been working with this issue for years and years.

"For me, I’m in the business of filmmaking because I want to change the world,” adds Poulsen. “I feel very privileged to be able to make documentary films about important issues and to be able to contribute to a better world.”