The Porters

"How did the Whites manage to get into the heads of the Blacks?" wonders a young Brussels resident, upon seeing images of porters whose docility in the face of colonizers intrigues him. To counter the denial of the impact of this abominable past, Sarah Vanagt inserts into scenes that could be ordinary lists of objects brought back from Congo and still exhibited in a Belgian museum. Rather than forgetting them too quickly, the goal is to appropriate them and let them evoke memory and imagination. The porters are also these young people who, whether they like it or not, carry a history and adopt a critical distance toward it. The journey the filmmaker offers them is not limited to a simple revisitation: beyond the crimes of the past, the artifacts she confronts them with serve as keys to understanding the mechanisms of political intimidation.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian
Member of the selection committee at Cinéma du réel,
Critic at the Cahiers du Cinéma