Blood in the Mobile

Minerals from Congo are used in the making of mobile phones. In the past 15 years, five million people have died in the country's civil war, and the UN has been reporting a connection between the mineral trade and the war for a long time now. Danish documentarian Frank Poulsen feels guilty about all this - he doesn't want to keep sending text messages to his wife if it means it might have cost a life in Congo. He goes knocking at the door of market leader Nokia, but only gets the runaround. The company that prides itself on social responsibility cannot even guarantee that it never imports minerals from Congo. Poulsen realizes that his status as a consumer is keeping the trade alive, so he decides to travel to the village of Walikale and the inaccessible Bisie mine in Congo - a no-go area - to observe the dangerous conditions in which primarily underage miners extract cassiterite (tinstone). In the process, he discovers who's making money on all of this. A bureaucrat at the Ministry of Mining ends up having a company that handles in mining permits, the army collects tolls at the port, and warlords buy weapons with the profits that the minerals generate - all this so we can call our loved ones.