WHAT IT’S ABOUT: A series of interconnected vignettes show the vivid, brutal and absurd realities of humans entangled in King Leopold’s project of colonizing Congo, to which he famously referred to as “a slice of this magnificent African cake.” The king himself stumbles in the darkness, not able to tell dream from the lucid state. The white Belgians see the new colonies as an opportunity to eschew existing responsibilities and start over but end up facing the ghosts of their lives left behind. Meanwhile, the locals are pulled into the colonial business, by will or by force, only to find that they’re disposable.

WHO MADE IT: The directors, Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels are a filmmaking duo currently living in Ghent. De Swaef grew up on a Belgian farm and had been dealing with wool all her life, making puppets from an early age. Now, this craft has found its new iteration in wool stop-motion animations that she makes along with her partner Roels. Both of them come from a live-action background instead of animation, so their medium is a physical exploration of the way life is personified through the fabric, rather than more precise mise-en-scenes used by those reared in the animated tradition. De Swaef and Roels first reached success with their animated short “Oh Willy” about a nudist and a yeti, and then further explored felt bodies in sumo-based “Fight.” Colonization is not a foreign theme for the two, as Roels is half-South African, and had lived in Johannesburg until his adolescence. A dedicated team of animators, constructors, puppet fabricators, and producers helped the couple realize their vision in scrupulous recreation of a feverish reality. Of the voice actors, “This Magnificent Cake!” offers a nice collection of Belgian talent, with older white men voicing the colonists, and younger actors of African heritage voicing the Congolese characters.

WHY DO WE CARE: Colonization is a heavy subject, and requires a lot of intelligence and sensitivity from the makers for the film to be successful. “This Magnificent Cake!” is a satirical, abstract piece, which doesn’t seek to educate on the bloody history of King Leopold’s empire-building—that’s a whole separate endeavor which hopefully will be explored in time by an incoming generation of Congolese or Belgian-Congolese filmmakers. However, “This Magnificent Cake!” manages to drive all the things you need to know about colonization to the point, while also fixing the issues that had plagued the preceding rich, but the problematic tradition of satirical stabs at Leopold’s Congolese disaster. While Leopold himself is present in this narrative, an authoritarian, albeit loopy tyrant, the scope of complicity is widened to show how colonization was able to spread with the energy of Ponzi schemes, because the white colonists who enabled the project’s implementation were sleazy opportunists. The narratives of complicity are the defining force in how we revise history today, and to see the ordinary Belgians pursue the African dream through losing their humanity is a much-needed perspective on the matter. The hazy adventures of Belgian settlers are no less eloquent than Joseph Conrad’s most poignant scenes in “Heart of Darkness,” but they’re not attributed the status of heroics or catastrophes. Drunken bouts, shitting in the bushes and altered states—the utter mundanity of evil as depicted in “This Magnificent Cake!” is the lesson we fail to learn again and again, whenever genocide fuses itself with the routine practices of the petty bourgeoisie.