We really excited about our programme of travel guide films that Vice have curated for us from their body of work. Through-out the festival, in the Salon we’ll be screening THE VICE GUIDE TO CONGO & THE REBELS OF LIBYA, THE VICE GUIDE TO BELFAST. So grab a coffee from the Roasted Brown Coffee stand, grab a bite to eat from Pieminister, sit down and enjoy the shows.
Trailer for the Vice Guide to Belfast here:
THE REBELS OF LIBYA,
The first time I went to Libya, in 2010, I was arrested just two days into my trip. Filming a documentary for VICE, I was detained for shooting where the authorities thought I shouldn’t, and thus began endless rounds of questions, emphatic yelling, and head-shaking incredulity at my claims of innocence—and, of course, the requisite implications that I was a spy. When I was finally released, I swore I would never return to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (official name). But that promise was quickly broken, and I found myself back in the country almost exactly a year later, in the midst of a chaotic and violent revolution.
Very rarely is one given the chance to live history, to experience revolution firsthand in all its ugly glory. And it is ugly. Sporadic, disordered communications; crumbling and damaged infrastructure that inhibits movement; intermittent electricity; infrequent meals; and the thumping bass of faraway artillery and the treble of nearby machine-gun fire ensures dialed-up adrenaline. It is, at its best, organized chaos and, at its worst, anarchic chaos. But what a wonderful chaos it is. Watching the push for freedom against one of recent history’s most tyrannical dictators has to be one of the most inspiring moments of my life.
THE VICE GUIDE TO CONGO
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world and thanks to an insanely complicated mix of politics, armed conflict, and corruption… it’s also one of the most under-reported. It also happens to be home to a nondescript black rock known as Coltan… a vital ingredient in the production of nearly every cell phone and computer on the planet. Without Coltan, our technology-driven lives would come to a screeching halt, and Congo has 80% of the world’s supply. Since the mid nineteen-nineties, armed groups have used these minerals to fund a series of fantastically complicated and horrifically violent wars.
Vice founder Suroosh Alvi travels to the Democratic Republic of Congo and makes one of the most grueling treks of his life to see first-hand where this so-called “conflict mineral” comes from and to meet some of the rebels involved in the seemingly never-ending conflict in Eastern Congo.
THE VICE GUIDE TO BELFAST.
There was a time when the conflict in Northern Ireland suffused popular culture, with its easily explicable cast of Catholics and Protestants and its deceptively simple narrative of joining the Republic of Ireland versus remaining under the protective wing of Great Britain. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) loomed large — an irregular force giving the Brits hell, a pre-Al Qaeda byword for terrorism.
But in 1998, after a furious but low-intensity war that claimed almost 3,700 victims over 30 years, the two sides suddenly called it a draw. Political representatives of paramilitary groups and mainstream political parties hammered out the Good Friday Agreement, outlining a cessation of major sectarian violence, the decommissioning of weapons, and the release of prisoners affiliated with groups like the IRA and its unionist analogue, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). There would be no land swaps, no significant concessions made to those demanding a united Ireland, just a tenuous and long-overdue “peace process.” It marked, as an Irish journalist once told me, the effective surrender of the IRA.
But in the unionist communities of east Belfast and nationalist enclaves of west Belfast — working-class areas where militant sectarianism is one of few birthrights — there is little sense of peace and much talk of being “sold out by the tea-drinking politicians.” And every year on July 12, when unionists of the Orange Order celebrate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James by marching through Belfast, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Troubles never ended.
In the lead up to this year’s twelfth parade, tensions were running higher than any period in recent memory. It was only a few months since a 25-year-old Catholic police officer was murdered by dissident republicans (to dissuade others from joining the force) and just weeks after altercations between nationalists and unionists in east Belfast ended in riots and multiple shootings, including a cameraman. What better time for VICE to explore Belfast and marinate in the divisive hate?
