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FILM: A Congolese Woman’s Journey of Survival and Triumph

Amanda Bransford

NEW YORK, Jun 22 2010 (IPS) - Suffering through the atrocities of war affects people in different ways. Some become crippled by anger, others by fear. Some become violent and want only revenge. And some, like Rose Mapendo, an inspiring survivor of the war and ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, come out with a strong commitment to work for peace and reconciliation.

“One person alone cannot push an elephant, but many together can,” she tells a group of Congolese women in the new documentary, “Pushing the Elephant”, which screened in New York as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, running Jun. 10-24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Centre’s Walter Reade Theatre.

Mapendo’s husband was killed during the violence in the Congo in the late 1990s, and she lived through harrowing experiences in death camps with nine children, including a pair of twins who were born, in the dark, in the camp. Mapendo recalls that she couldn’t even find a clean tool to cut the umbilical cord.

Mapendo’s four-year-old daughter Nangabire, however, was with her grandparents when the family was forced to flee, separating her from her mother.

Filmmakers Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel heard Mapendo’s story when they met a founder of Mapendo International, an organisation that cares for at-risk African refugees. They learned that Mapendo, who had resettled in the United States, would soon reunite with Nangabire after 12 years. Mandel says that the pair knew they had found a story they had to tell and rushed to begin filming in two weeks.

“I think Rose’s message is very powerful,” Mandel told IPS, “but part of what makes it so powerful is that it is coming from Rose. So frequently the people who are talking about peace and reconciliation are people who are approaching it from the outside.”

Mapendo has become an outspoken activist for peace in the Congo and works to help other refugees in her new city of Phoenix, Arizona.

The simultaneously harrowing and hopeful documentary follows her work to help put women at the forefront of the peacemaking process. “Unite, even if your husbands are fighting,” Mapendo tells Congolese women.

“Pushing the Elephant” also follows 16-year-old Nangabire’s acclimation to life in the United States with her big family, and tells the story of the horrors of war in the Congo and the difficult decisions Mapendo had to make to ensure her family’s survival.

Davenport and Mandel, who have worked on eight previous social issue documentaries, captured intimate scenes of family life, high school, and Rose’s activism over two and a half years of filming.

“One of the things that we really aspire to is to try to play as much of an observational role on set as possible,” Davenport says. “We just sort of let things happen.”

In these candid scenes, the audience is able to see Nangabire try to follow her mother’s advice to leave her painful past behind. “My mother teaches forgiveness because it helped her,” she says in the film. “And she is confident it will help others.” Though the many Mapendo children sometimes find it difficult to part with their mother as she goes about her work, their pride in her is evident as they see the effects she has on others.

“For us, to be in the presence of someone who has such grace and such integrity and such passion for her purpose makes her cause impossible to ignore,” says Mandel.

She says that knowing Mapendo has made all who worked on the film more conscious of forgiveness in their everyday lives. “Rose makes everyone around her a better person.”

For Mandel and Davenport, completing “Pushing the Elephant” was only the beginning of an extensive audience engagement campaign.

The film will be shown in festivals around the United States, and taken to refugee camps in Africa. The filmmakers are partnering, says Davenport, “with organisations that can use it to make a difference in refugee resettlement, women’s empowerment, peace and reconciliation”.

“Pushing the Elephant” will also be broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in March 2011 as part of Independent Television Service’s Women’s Empowerment Initiative.