
Jambo Amani?
A group of FDLR militiamen in eastern Congo lay down their weapons and volunteer for a United Nations reintegration programme, and the camera follows them out of the mountains of North Kivu, a region their armed group has fought over for years. A helicopter carries them to Goma, where the film picks up the strange transition from soldier to civilian: men who have known only combat waiting to see what the UN process actually offers them once the fighting stops. Shot in direct cinema style, with no narrator standing between the men and the audience, the film lets their conversations and silences carry the story rather than explaining it for them. Director Unai Aranzadi keeps the focus small and specific, on faces and paperwork and the mechanics of demobilization, instead of the wider war. The title, Swahili for something like "Hello, peace?", is the question the film keeps circling without answering for them: whether renouncing a war is the same thing as finding a way to live after it.