Earlier this year [2013], I was on stage at London’s Young Vic playing Patrice Lumumba – a remarkable man who made a remarkable journey from being a beer salesman to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister. The play was called A Season in the Congo, and it focused on the years in which the country won its independence from Belgium. Lumumba was elected to office in June 1960; less than three months later, he was ousted in a coup. The following January, he was killed by firing squad. The plot was almost certainly organised with the backing of Belgium and the US.

The play, by the Martinique-born writer Aimé Césaire, made me think – about the relationship between African nations and western ones, about the violent history of Congo and its struggles to deal with its past. As I started working on a script for the short film that would become Columbite Tantalite, I knew that I wanted to weave in the firsthand experiences I’d had travelling to Goma and Kinshasa, and draw on the wider politics of the region. Though my story would partly dwell on Congo’s past, I wanted it to be set in the present. Congo now and Congo then.

As I researched for the play, I became fascinated by the story of coltan: an extraordinary mineral that’s mined mainly in the eastern areas of the present-day Congo. In the ground, it’s a metallic ore; when refined, it acquires unique heat-resistant characteristics that make it perfect for use in electronic capacitors. As a result, it is present in nearly every electronic device you can name. Coltan is with us almost everywhere we are – in smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, games consoles – but few people have heard of it. And its story reaches back directly to Congo, where the mining industry has been linked with everything from bankrolling civil wars in the region to the destruction of gorilla habitats.

In full, coltan’s name is columbite-tantalite, after Tantalus, the figure in Greek mythology who was condemned to a horrifying eternal torment, of the things he most desired being just out of his grasp. For many people in Congo, that’s exactly what coltan is – close enough to touch, but its riches out of reach. Like copper at the birth of the electrical age, rubber during the era of automobiles, diamonds for as long as they have been mined, it’s a substance that Congo has supplied to other countries, and which, for all the wealth it generates, has turned into a kind of curse. I knew then that I had the nugget of an idea. And the title for the film.

Without giving too much away, the story focuses on a character who has made a life out of coltan and his attempts to come to terms with his past. Interwoven with this is another strand, which focuses on a new computer game that’s being developed, a game so lifelike that it’s almost like stepping into another world. The young guy promoting the game has no sense at all of how he’s involved in the wider scheme. Indeed, the idea that he is connected to a conflict in a remote part of the world would seem absurd.

But, in a way, that’s what was interesting to me: the capitalist system itself being almost like a game. A game with winners and losers, a game that has had terrible, devastating consequences for so many people in the world. A game that we all play, and in which we manage to silence the horrors that implicate us.

• Columbite Tantalite is the latest in a series of short feature collaborations between the Young Vic and the Guardian

>via: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/dec/11/columbite-tantalite-film-congo-chiwetel-ejiofor