The Burden

A heartbreaking scene turns up near the halfway point of The Burden. A woman and her husband living in Central African Republic speak to God. Both are infected with HIV; both live in extreme poverty. Even if God won’t help her, Reine prays, can He show his mercy on her husband, Rodrigue?

“Let him become a pastor and provide for our family,” she pleads. “Dear God, without you, we don’t know what to do.” Her husband, pummeled and defeated by life, looks on grimly.

It is no longer possible to see documentaries like Elvis Sabin Ngaibino’s and not hear the loud cries of criticism. Poverty porn! African misery!

That The Burden has premiered in a festival as big, European and, yes, white like IDFA lends veracity to those cries. The challenge for the filmmaker insisting on marching down this well-trod lane of African wretchedness is to find a way to fuse characters that are representative of their continent’s material desolation and yet come with their own specific dilemmas. This stubborn but ambitious filmmaker with a thing for tricky themes of this sort has to find people whose privation and sincerity can pierce through minds armour-plated by the socio-political jargon of the day.

On that score, Ngaibino has done exceedingly well. In that one prayer scene, Reine and Rodrigue, through the director’s camera, are able to convey their anguish uniquely, even if their problems are hardly unique in a continent filled with disease and penury. They also have an eerie appeal on the screen. In a different life, they could be the actors chosen to play their own real lives.

As the story unfolds, Rodrigue’s condition becomes exacerbated. But the deeper injury is to his pride. He wants to be a pastor, a career choice inspired by his wife, but he can’t quite reveal his disease to his pastor and the congregation. Who will allow a person living with HIV to lead a church? He disappears from fellowship for an extended period, which makes his secret and the possibility of it being divulged a subplot. Reine’s increasing panic and search for money becomes another subplot that reaches peak drama during a fight in a market.

Ngaibino has been here before. His first documentary feature, Makongo, showed poor students making their way through school. He also had a hand in producing Rafiki Fariala’s We Students, another film about poor students in his home country. The latter showed up at the Berlinale in 2022. The former won awards. So, it is safe to say that films of this sort will continue to be produced and to great success. Indeed, nobody can deny The Burden an extensive life at festivals and film schools around Europe and North America.

No one should begrudge a filmmaker working in a poor country his just rewards, for finding a rewarding story time after time — but one may wish and, perhaps, recommend? Might it be possible for Ngaibino, who surely is one of CAR’s leading lights in documentary filmmaking, to expand his coverage? Is it possible to find a scene like the prayer scene in The Burden in a story not quite as dire?

Of course, the nature of such a wish/recommendation ignores the ecosystem that makes African stories like this successful outside the continent. If there is no real market for the filmmaker within his country, he has to seek ways and stories that will sate a foreign appetite. They may be of vastly different realities, but on some level Reine and Rodrigue’s economic situation is similar to Ngaibino’s storytelling preferences. In both cases, the underlying pathology is a country and continent’s avowed irresponsibility towards its citizens.