A layered, engrossing and intruiguing look at a national collective trauma and the ambitious initiative to try and heal wounds.

In war torn countries people will not be able to be productive and development will fail until they overcome their trauma.

Is it possible for a country choked by the legacy of five million deaths to successfully move on? That is the underlying question in Congolese documentary filmmaker Djo Munga's powerful film about the intervention by the German initiative Program GTZ in a country fighting to cleanse its soul of decades of despair. In a series of fly-on-the-wall scenes and candid, heartbreaking interviews, Munga follows the arrival in the DRC of PBSP (Pesso Boyden System Psychomoto) founder Dr Albert Pesso. Pesso, in the DRC at the behest of GTZ and the DRC government, brings with him a technique of talking about loss, forgiving, and finding new memories to overlay the traumatic older ones.

Ultimately the psychologists, behaviourists, social workers and others who conduct the sessions and do the interviews are left as moved by the epidemic of desensitised numbness as the people who live it. Attempts at shattering the endemic paralysis are difficult to say the least, as both filmmaker Munga and GTZ programme director Anselm Schneider concede.

A State of Mind is an illuminating window into one of history's darkest periods and an accomplished study on the limits and complexities of cultural exchange.


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