Waiting on the Past: African Uranium Futures in Arlit, Deuxième Paris

Abstract

Idrissou Mora-Kpai's poetic documentary Arlit, Deuxième Paris (2005), centers on Arlit, Niger, a small town simultaneously dependent on and devastated by uranium mining. The documentary exploits cinematic duration and distance—two features associated with so-called slow cinema—to represent the experiential dimensions of waiting imposed by the global economics of resource extraction in Africa. It highlights the violence uranium extraction inflicts on human bodies and the environment, moving between the testimonies of the villagers who live above the uranium mine and images of a landscape littered with contaminated machinery.

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