National Diploma
Congolese students take their education into their own hands after getting kicked out of school for not bribing their teachers.
Overview
Being a teenager and going to school everyday seems hard enough. We live in a society that takes high school education for granted and many kids are funneled through the school education system and straight into University, without giving it much thought. It's just what you do. We accept the burden of thousands of dollars of debt that accumulates with alarming speed, we fumble our way through last-minute assignment writing missions and doze through 8am lectures.
For others, an education, namely the piece of paper that states your grades and proves you are qualified, is imperative for a shot at living a good life. Some cultures are highly competitive and over-saturated with hard workers, others simply lack opportunity and financial and social stability.
In Kisangani, the Democratic Republic of Congo you can get kicked out of school for not paying your teacher regular bribes. A group of teenagers get fed up—they are ready to study hard for the looming National Diploma exams, but the only lessons they get from their teachers are in corruption. So, they take matters into their own hands. They rent a house that they set up as a study base, get their noses stuck into books and get to work. The director Dieudo Hamadi is a native resident of Kisangani, which allows him to smoothly blend into the background and observe the developments of the students' lives in a fly-on-the-wall fashion. The dread of coming exams is something we can all relate to, but the National Diploma gives a different perspective on what it's like to navigate an educational system hampered by corruption and bureaucracy. Maybe those NCEA exams weren't so bad after all.
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