From the film 'Kadoma.'
Hendrik Coetzee was not a man easily dominated. After he led the first expedition from the source of the Nile in Uganda to the Mediterranean—a 4,100-mile trip he undertook in 2004 to show the humanitarian situation in that part of the world—some people griped that he hadn’t started at the true source of the storied river. The next year he traveled the extra 465 miles from Kagera to Lake Victoria to silence his critics.
Coetzee also kayaked solo down Murchison Falls on the Nile, which looks like Jaws on a river, a feat so daunting that pro kayakers-turned-filmmakers Ben Stookesberry of Mt. Shasta and Chris Korbulic of Rogue River, Oregon don’t even consider it in Kadoma, screening Friday as part of the Banff Film Festival. With Coetzee as their guide, they are set on attempting the first kayaking expedition down the Lukuga River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The trip is fraught with difficulties of a bureaucratic nature and the danger posed by armed guerrilla factions waging a nasty civil war. Still, the three encounter the welcoming generosity of villagers in locations so remote the nearest telephone is 80 miles away.
One hundred miles into their 120-mile journey down the Lukuga, tragedy strikes the trio. Maybe the most haunting thing about it is how it comes at midday, amid surreal calm that swallows up disaster as if it had never even existed.
KADOMA (NR; 42 min.) screens Friday, Feb. 24, at the Rio.
