The thing about poverty—and particularly African poverty, which might be the worst kind of poverty in the world—is it can’t absorb the shock of even a small accident. You must think of poverty as a kind of ecosystem with very little complexity, an ecosystem that has only one or two types of plants. If one thing goes wrong (an infection or an attack by a deadly fungus), the impact cascades through the whole system very rapidly. And so it is in the feature film Félicité, which is set in the capital of one of the poorest countries in the world, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Alain Gomis—the Franco-Senegalese director whose last film, Today, starred Saul Williams—wrote the script, which concerns a woman who, though having a regular gig as a singer at a local joint, is still far from making ends meet. The accident that destabilizes her is her son’s illness. She is a single mother. Her son is 14. Her whole life could be ruined by this shock. The film has stunning images. by Charles Mudede