Let Us Fight

Logline

In Goma, Eastern Congo, Mugisho, a son of a military family and a a local champion of boxing, undergoes constant family pressure to join the ranks of the army. After the M23 rebels took the city of Goma in the begging of 2025 , Mugisho decide to leave his passion of boxing and join the army due to his family’s pressure.

Synopsis

In the city of Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mugisho lives in the suffocating shadow of a destiny he did not choose. Born in a military camp and the son of a soldier, he soon undergoes constant family pressure to join the ranks of the army.

To escape this path of violence traced by his father, Mugisho desperately seeks refuge: he finds it in boxing. His meeting with Matata, garage manager and coach with a past marked by war, is the turning point in his life. Within the Virunga Club, Mugisho discovers a new family. Boxing becomes his sanctuary, a peaceful alternative where he channels his rage and resistance in the face of a society that only offers him a rifle.

However, at the end of 2023, the noose tightens. As the M23 rebellion progresses towards Goma, the government launches an urgent appeal for the mobilization of youth. Living in the heart of the military camp, Mugisho sees his father’s pressure become unbearable. Caught between his ideals and the urgency of protecting his family, he eventually gives in and joins the army.

After six months of rigorous training, his battalion is deployed on the front line in Goma to fight the M23. The boxer becomes a soldier in spite of himself, fighting on the land where he once trained. During his military participation, he clings to his identity as an athlete, even giving boxing lessons to his superiors, trying to maintain a human discipline in the midst of the inhumanity of the fighting.

In early 2025, history turns into tragedy. Goma falls into the hands of the M23 in January, followed by Bukavu in February. In the rout, Mugisho’s battalion retreats. It is there that the thread of his existence is interrupted. Some comrades in arms say that he fell as a hero on the battlefield during the war; others do not confirm his death.

For his family, it is the beginning of a despairing wait to see him alive again. Driven from the military camp by the rebels, his mother finds herself wandering the streets of Goma with her five children. Célestin, Mugisho’s younger brother, is forced to drop out of school to support the family, while their father struggles between life and death on the front line in Walikale, an enclave territory to the west, rich in strategic minerals and the last rampart still under government control.

Today, in the midst of the rubble of their past life, Mugisho’s mother refuses to accept the irreparable: the death of Mugisho on the frontline. In a city where she must hide her status as a military family to escape the rebels’ hunts, she clings to prayer and the mad hope of seeing her son alive again.

The Virunga Club, faithful to its original mission, remains her only anchor, a rescue family that helps her bear the unbearable. “Let Us Fight” then becomes the poignant story of human resilience: the fight no longer takes place in a ring, but in every breath of a mother who waits, and in every sacrifice of a brother who survives.

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