Film Festival 09 - Enjoy Poverty
Enjoy Poverty
Episode III, The Netherlands 2008, 90m
Director: Renzo Martens
Festivals: Amsterdam Documentary 2008
Call it a kamikaze attack on the Society of the Spectacle. As
purposefully offensive as its title promises, Enjoy Poverty
investigates the trade-offs surrounding what its perpetrator,
artist Renzo Martens, describes as 'Africa's most lucrative export:
filmed poverty'. He spent three years in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo talking with poor labourers, plantation owners, aid
workers and foreign journalists. He riles some and baffles others
testing his thesis that poverty is a national asset because it
attracts foreign aid. Such NGOs as Médecins sans
Frontières, stage-manage the imagery for Western eyes, he
suggests, and are complicit in creating a cover for exploitation by
Western corporations which in turn offer them and the media
military protection. In his most excruciating intervention he
encourages impoverished village people to try selling photographs
of their own suffering to Western media. Martens has the
incisiveness not to portray himself as akin to a poor African and
throws his own artist's vanity into the bonfire too.
In French, Lingala, English, Dutch and Swahili, with English
subtitles
