What happens when hundreds of children from the DRC drop their tools and abandon the mines for a new life? They go to school, start businesses and stop dying at a young age. A rare and timely look at the dangers of DR Congo’s small-scale mining sector that powers our digital age, this film takes the viewer to a place few have ventured before: inside the copper and cobalt mines in Kolwezi, southern DRC. This film follows a grass-roots initiative that has generated much conversation — from the streets of Kolwezi to the halls of the United Nations HQ in New York — on how the Congolese can break the cycle of poverty, abuse and exploitation inflicted on it by multinational mining companies to build a sustainable development model that’s powered by the country’s most potent resource: its people.
This Good Shepherd project was featured prominently in a January, 2016 Amnesty International report on the international cobalt trade, and the dangers to children: https://goo.gl/8oZtKw
Film Credits:
Written and Filmed by
Luca Paradiso, Bernhard Warner
Giampaolo Bisegna
Narrated by
Bernhard Warner
Edited by
Giampaolo Bisegna
Luca Paradiso
Executive Producer
Cristina Duranti
for the Good Shepherd International Foundation