The subject of Gravesend, a new film by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, is coltan, a mineral so valuable it was considered the new blood diamond. The work takes its name from a town in Kent, England, from which the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set sail for the Congo. While its unembellished footage brings it into a discursive relationship with documentary and other forms of reportage, Gravesend above all else is a poem, and an epic one at that. Strikingly beautiful, and supremely ambitious, it is a highly formal meditation that speaks by looking.
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