The film Eat Bitter revolves around the daily lives of two protagonists in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. One is Thomas Boa, a local young man who works as a “sand diver,” manually extracting sand from the riverbed. The other is Luan Jianmin, a Chinese construction contractor who moved to Bangui seeking for better economic opportunities. In the film, sand links the protagonists, who might not have met otherwise, through intricate political, economic, and social networks: one extracts it while the other collects and purchases it for construction, with their only encounter occurring at the bank’s inauguration ceremony attended by the president.
Although themes like resource extraction and infrastructure development might seem to place this film within the typical “China-Africa” narrative—often associated with state-led foreign capital and labor exploitation—the film goes beyond this familiar pattern. It explores the personal stories behind these interactions, offering a rich, localized view of contemporary urban life in Bangui and the complexity of transnational mobilities between Africa and China.
The film provides insights into the precarious positionality of African youth amid global and local economic and political forces, yet they are not merely portrayed as passive victims. Filmed over fifteen months, the production team witnessed both the Covid-19 pandemic and the looming threat of civil war ahead of the 2020 national elections in the Central African Republic. The film captures women’s civic organizations leading anti-war protests in the streets, as well as conversations and street performances of young sand divers, who face forced unemployment due to the city hall’s requisition of their extraction site. These scenes reveal their self-awareness of the systemic challenges that shape their roles, positions, and experiences in society.
The scenes on Luan’s construction site not only reflect the imbalanced work dynamics between foreigners and locals but also illustrate the transient nature of the Chinese labor force in Africa. Since the 1990s, broad socioeconomic transformations in China, including a drastic cut in state welfare and heightened job market pressure, have driven many laborers from both urban and rural areas to seek employment abroad, primarily in construction and manufacturing sectors. Some of Luan’s colleagues in the film are construction workers at home, and many of them have been moving between construction sites in Africa and Asia, such as Congo-Brazzaville and Brunei. The tensions within Luan’s families also suggest how the mobility of these male workers often comes at the cost of the immobility of other family members, underscoring the contradictions and imbalances inherent in China’s growing outward labor migration.
One key strength of the film lies in its subtle depictions of emotional landscapes of the two protagonists. The two female directors, Pascale Appora-Gnekindy from the Central African Republic and Ningyi Sun from China, closely followed the lives of Thomas Boa and Luan Jianmin, capturing their personal stories with both warmth and respect. The process of their collaboration, negotiation, and mutual compromise also mirrors one of the film’s themes: how seemingly disparate lives are underpinned by shared concerns, reflected in their feelings towards family, their hopes for the future, and their interpretations of the film’s title, “Eating Bitter.”
The two protagonists, despite differences in nationality, age, and family relations, share notable similarities. Both are fathers and husbands who had to leave school early to support their families through physical labor. The film’s title, “Eat Bitter,” encapsulates their common experiences and enduring resilience. In the broader context of China’s social transformation, this phrase carries significant social meaning and historical relevance. For individuals like Luan, it is part of the socialist collective memory of “eating bitter and then tasting sweet,” emphasizing the value placed on enduring hardship and making personal sacrifices for the greater good or for achieving collective goals. For Boa, this term represents a necessary path to self-realization in their pursuit of a better life. As he expresses in his own song, “Through misery and suffering, I knew that one day, I would be happy,” he hopes that enduring this pain will ultimately lead to an “evolution” in his destiny (1:33:05).
This film does not explicitly point out that the term “Eating Bitter” encompasses more complex temporal connotations and contradictory experiences. In the context of transnational movements in the Global South, the term signifies a precarious and exhausting present that often leads to an even more uncertain future. Many Chinese laborers who migrate elsewhere to escape the present often find themselves in a continuous state of suspension. For Central African sand divers like Boa, their movement from one part of the riverbank to another often traps them in a “vortex of mobility,” within which their only asset—their own bodies—is continually invested and wasted. The lingering impact of the film Eat Bitter lies in its prescient portrayal of how, both in Africa and China, an increasing number of people find themselves caught in such a vortex.
