NOISE THAT BRINGS MONEY (BRUIT QUI APPORTE L'ARGENT) # 153
09:00, Wednesday 17th June, Cinema 3
Director/Anthropologist: Konrad Pilot
Year of Release: 2013
Duration: 41 mins
Country of Production: Norway
Location: Cameroon
Ethnic Group: Cameroonian
Language: Fulfulde and French with English subtitles
On the outskirts of Maroua in northern Cameroon the local blacksmiths turn scrap iron into objects for everyday use. Car bodies become wheelbarrows, truck wheels are transformed into ploughs and smaller pieces of scrap iron end up as spoons. Noise That Brings Money is a portrait of Abakar, who, motivated by the success of his newly invented electric cooker dreams of turning his workshop into a modern blacksmith enterprise. His entrepreneurial struggles, deriving from the lack of scholarly education and bureaucratic know-how, the omnipresent recycling and appropriation of globally widespread material objects, as well as the reliance on embodied skills in order to fabricate objects usually manufactured on assembly lines, are all examples of globalization as experienced by those on the unprivileged end of the society who nonetheless want to make their dream come true.