'Enjoy Poverty'

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Dutch artist Renzo Martens spent three years traveling throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo asking the question: "Who owns poverty?"


For two years, Renzo Martens traveled around the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the capital of Kinshasa to deep into the interior. Camera in hand, he roves through the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country and get thus to one conclusion: poverty is there to stay, and fighting it is an industry of which the poor benefit very little. In response, the filmmaker launches an emancipation program in which he makes Congo's inhabitants aware of their primary capital resource: poverty. As a symbol, he mounts a neon sign in the middle of the forest that reads "Enjoy Poverty".

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