12th Annual Congo in Harlem Film Festival
Celebrating Congolese Music and Culture
Saturday, October 31st | 12-2pm EST
Congo Week and Congo in Harlem culminate in a virtual online concert to celebrate the successful culmination of Congo Week 2020.
The concert will feature artists from around the world, showcasing Congolese music in all its diversity, with some surprise guest appearances. Current line-up inlcudes: Nkumu Katalay, Rafiya, Deja Belle, Kiku Experience, Mr. Lumemo, Lumino, Marsahl Dixon, Guy & Nicole Nkele, Ange Kayaya, and African Boy Tswe. Find the full program HERE.
This event will premier simultaneously on social media platforms. Stay tuned for more info.
Co-Presented by Friends of the Congo, Congo Square - The Show, Congo Love, Kin Kultur, and Tabilulu Productions
Main Slate Features
System K
Renaud Barret, 2019, 94 min
Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a vast, chaotic mega-city of 12 million. Water is privatized and the electric grid is capricious. Here, street artists’ performances are wildly creative, angry, irreverent, often shocking. With names like Kong Astronaute, Strombo, and Kill Bill, they masterfully repurpose urban detritus (computer parts, TV sets, bullet shells, machetes) and work with fire and paint, wax and blood — to critique government corruption, Western exploitation, and entrenched poverty. SYSTEM K reveals a vibrant, raw, politically astute world of performance art the likes of which exist nowhere else on earth.
CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH
Peter Bate, 2003, 90 min
CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH offers a shocking account of Belgian colonial rule, detailing the brutal, gulag-like conditions that King Leopold II imposed on the Congolese people to harvest the country’s abundant supply of rubber. The Belgian government has denounced this film as a “tendentious diatribe” for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people -- but the transgressions are undeniable, and their documentation launched the modern Human Rights movement. Nearly 30 years after its initial release, Peter Bate’s film endures as one of the most informative and moving chronicles of Congo under colonial rule.
PALIMPSEST OF THE AFRICA MUSEUM
Matthias De Groof, 2019, 69 min
In 1897, King Léopold II created the Royal Museum for Central Africa to showcase artifacts and natural specimens pillaged from Congo Free State. In 1910, the collection was moved into a lavish, iconic neoclassical palace, cementing the museum as a symbol of Western arrogance. Now, more than a century later, the building and spirit are in need of renewal, and the museum closes its doors for renovation. As the last visitors file out, filmmaker Matthias De Groof takes up his camera to bear witness to the dismantling of colonial dioramas and internal conversations that will determine the future of the museum. In charting a new path forward, museum staff and delegates from African organizations convene to ponder the project's most basic questions – Who is the museum for? And what is the story being told?
SNEAK PREVIEW:
DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA
Dieudo Hamadi, 2020, 88 min
In early June 2000, during the wake of the Rwandan genocide and the Second Congo War, a brutal conflict erupted between Rwandan and Ugandan forces in Kisangani. The armies pummelled the city with heavy weapons, killing over 6,000 Congolese, injuring many thousands more, and laying waste to hundreds of millions of dollars in property. The conflict was so devastating it earned its own distinction as the “Six-Day War”. Although this episode has largely been forgotten, its imprint remains on the bodies and lives of the residents of Kisangani, who for years have been fighting for recognition and compensation. Tired of unsuccessful pleas, a group of survivors takes matters into their own hands. Filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi, documents their 1000+ mile journey down the Congo River to the capital city of Kinshasa where they intend to voice their claims.
SNEAK PREVIEW:
CONGO CALLING
Stephan Hilpert, 2019, 90 min
In Goma, eastern Congo, three European development aid workers are forced to question what it means to help. Raúl, a French-Spanish economist doing research on rebel groups, realizes that he is leading his Congolese colleagues into great temptation with his project funds, putting their study at risk of failing. After 30 years in Africa, Peter, from Germany, reaches retirement age and is unable to renew his job contract. He struggles to stay in Congo and to preserve his identity as an aid worker. And the relationship of Anne-Laure, from Belgium, is put to the test when her Congolese partner, Fred Bauma of the La Lucha youth movement, becomes a high-profile regime critic. CONGO CALLING reveals deeply personal and complex insights into the coexistence and cooperation between Europe and Africa – and raises the question: how helpful is the help of the West?
STOP FILMING US
Joris Postema, 2020, 95 min
Showing October 16th - 20th, 2020
Can a Western filmmaker show anything of truth about the Democratic Republic of Congo? Or do Western 'good intentions' only cause destruction and frustration? In meeting three young artists from Goma who oppose the one-sided Western imagery, filmmaker Joris Postema takes these questions head-on, and attempts to unpack the mutual preconceptions that form the barrier between “them” and “us”.
MAIN SLATE SHORTS:
SHORTS PROGRAM 1: CONGO NOW
Portrait of Goma
Christian Bitwaiki, 2020, 4 min
A raw account of Goma’s once bustling city streets and social hubs, now deserted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
À DEMAIN?
Faustin Linyekula, 2019, 13 min
A neglected child hustles the streets of Kisangani and witnesses an altercation that gives him insight about his absent father.
LETTERS FROM CONGO
Studios Kabako with Didier Ediho, Jeannot Kumbonyeki, Collectif D’Art D’Art, and Dorine Mokha, 2020, 24 min
LETTERS FROM CONGO is an anthology of four video diaries made by Congolese artists living in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the places where they live and make art, the artists share their daily lives and drive to create during a difficult period of isolation.
UP AT NIGHT
Nelson Makengo, 2019, 21 min
Using three juxtaposed screens, filmmaker Nelson Makengo inserts viewers into Kinshasa on the night of a “load shedding” power cut. As the city’s inhabitants voice their challenges and demonstrate their own creative solutions, the sounds of a generator give way to a radio bulletin about the Inga hydroelectric dam, and former president Joseph Kabila speaks about his record.
SHORTS PROGRAM 2: COLONIALISM REFRAMED
NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN
Baloji, 2020, 5 min
Using his trademark assemblage of esoteric costume and visual metaphors, Congolese-Belgian hitmaker and filmmaker Baloji explores the practice of skin lightening in black communities. Euphemistically described as ‘brightening’ or ‘toning’, skin bleaching takes many innocuous forms—such as creams, buffs and soaps—to deal with hyperpigmentation, but is more often used by women to emulate Eurocentric beauty standards.
REGARD
Maisha Maene, 2018, 4 min
Drawing on illustration, dance, and photography, filmmaker Maisha Maene deconstructs the process of image-making and recomposes the colonial gaze.
MACHINI
Tétshim + Frank Mukunday, 2019, 10 min
Self-taught Congolese artists Tétshim and Frank Mukunday use chalk drawings, stones and repurposed materials to depict the destructive and polluting influence of mining on urban Congo.
BAYINDO
Paul Shemisi, 2020, 15 min
Filmmaker Paul Shemisi offers a rare, observational portrait of “Kintuandi Tuka Kongo,” a Kinshasa-based animist community that attempts to restore the customs and ancestral faiths destroyed by Western missionaries and colonizers.
SECRET SCREENING
Anonymous, 2020, 9 min
A 1950s Belgian art film documenting Congolese masks and sculpture gets a re-edit -- now, instead of being spoken about, the objects speak back, voicing Aimé Césare’s seminal 1950 essay “Discourse on Colonialism.”
SHORTS PROGRAM 3: CONGO FORWARD
BUGS
David Shongo, 2019, 7 min
Taking climate change, exploitation, and Western upheaval of Congolese society as his starting point, filmmaker David Shongo builds on the photographic archives of Hans Himmelheber (1938-39) and hunting songs of Léon Verbeek to question the primacy of technology and globalization.
CORE DUMP
Francois Knoetze, 2018-2019, 4 films
A “core dump” is the recorded state of the working memory of a computer at a specific moment in time. If a crash occurs, the computer is able to recall this ‘imprint’ of its previous state as a means to debug and recover. This oddly poetic ‘memory’ of a computer forms the basis for Francois Knoetze’s CORE DUMP, a four-part sculptural and video series filmed in Dakar, Kinshasa, Shenzhen and New York that extends the metaphor of a crash to the impending breakdown and unsustainability of the global capitalist techno-scientific system.
CORE DUMP: DAKAR
Francois Knoetze, 2018, 12 min
In a TV repair shop, electronic waste is fused with the shop-owner’s body to form a cyborg that can re-embody historical data and hack online systems in pursuit of a utopian future. The film culminates at the Centre International du Commerce Extérieur with a re-enactment of a speech delivered by Leopold Sédar Senghor at the 1975 Non-Aligned Movement Conference.
CORE DUMP:
KINSHASA
Francois Knoetze, 2018, 10 min
Inspired by the writing of Joseph Tonda, CORE DUMP: KINSHASA situates popular Congolese mythology in the contemporary digital imagination. The film unfolds as an Afro-dystopian-sci-fi-horror that investigates the West’s notions of techno-utopias and the former colonies that are mined and dumped on to create these shimmering oases.
CORE DUMP: SHENZHEN
Francois Knoetze, 2018, 12 min
In 2012, images of the mermaid-like Congolese water spirit Mami Wata began to circulate rapidly in China, sparking rumors that Chinese laborers had captured her while installing underwater fiber-optic cables in the Congo River. CORE DUMP: SHENZHEN imagines a scenario where Mami Wata is transplanted into a gadget factory in China’s first free-market Special Economic Zone, revealing the depth and complexity of contemporary Sino-African relations.
CORE DUMP: NEW YORK
Francois Knoetze, 2019, 12 min
Taking Boston Dynamics’ iconic ‘Big Dog’ robot as a starting point, CORE DUMP: NEW YORK, contests the West as a site of freedom and progress. After escaping the lab, Big Dog is severed in two by the doors of a subway train, setting the scene for a parallel journey through New York City. Its journey ends when one half is dumped back in Dakar among a shipment of electronic waste, bringing the series full-circle as the two sides face each other from opposite shores of the Atlantic.
PERFORMANCES
DRUM CALL
Nkumu Katalay
Born in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, and now living in New York City, Nkumu Katalay and his music represent the blending of two worlds. For the past two decades, Isaac has worked as an ensemble musician, choreographer, dancer, and speaker. His style is a distinctive blend of contemporary and traditional Congolese dance moves and aesthetics, which he calls "CONTEMPTRA" (Contemporary-Traditional). Isaac is also founder of the Life Long Project which promotes Congolese music and culture in the US.
CLEAR MY PATH
Nkumu Katalay, 2020, 4 min
Born in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, and now living in New York City, Nkumu Katalay and his music represent the blending of two worlds. For the past two decades, Isaac has worked as an ensemble musician, choreographer, dancer, and speaker. His style is a distinctive blend of contemporary and traditional Congolese dance moves and aesthetics, which he calls "CONTEMPTRA" (Contemporary-Traditional). Isaac is also founder of the Life Long Project which promotes Congolese music and culture in the US.
MAKAYABU NA FUMBWA (Cooking Instructional Video)
Bantu Tastes, 2020, 8 min
Chef Barbara Lagazzele demonstrates the preparation of the classic Congolese dish Makayabu Na Fumbwa (salt fish with wild spinach). Download the full recipe HERE. For ingredients and more information about Congolese cooking, please visit Bantu Tastes.
KASALA: THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF DREAMS OR THE FIRST HUMAN, BENDE’S ERROR
Sammy Baloji, 2020, TK min
What happens to objects from Africa that are kept in museums in the northern hemisphere? How legitimate is it to reveal their inner life, uprooted from cultural context? Can the objects find their voice again? Are there other forms of memory? Multi-disciplinary artist Sammy Baloji explores these questions, taking the “Kasala”, a form of ceremonial poem, as his starting point. Performed by Fiston Mwanza Mujia (poetry), Patrick Dunst (music), and Grilli Pollheimer (music).
Co-presented by Axis Gallery
Dismantling The Lingering Edifices of Colonialism: Creating New Systems Grounded in African Realities
Panelists:
PETNA NDALIKO KATONDOLO is an award-winning filmmaker and educator from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His multi-genre artistic works are acclaimed for their provocative Ejo-Lobi (Afrofuturistic) artistic style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. He is founder and Artistic Director of the Yole!Africa cultural center and of the executive director of Alkebu film productions, he also teaches and consults regularly for international organizations addressing social and political inequity among youth through culture and education. He is currently the Artist in Residence at the Stone Center for Black History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His latest work includes the films: MATATA (2019), KAPITA (2020) and WE BECOME GODS (2020)
CHÉRIE RIVERS NDALIKO A descendant of the radical Black tradition, Chérie Rivers Ndaliko dedicates her scholarship and activism to eroding racial capitalism. Her revolutionary tools of choice are writing, teaching, and farming. In this spirit, she serves as Director of Research and Education at the Yole!Africa center in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has written award-winning books, produced internationally acclaimed films, and co-founded Uzuri Sanctuary, a biodynamic educational freedom farm in North Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and serves as an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
NGUGI WA THIONG’O currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 94 languages from around the world.
Moderator:
MILTON ALLAMADI publishes The Black Star News and BurkinaStyle. He is also author of 'The Hearts of Darkness…' about the history of Western media demonization of Africa. He is an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) in New York City in the Africana Studies Department. He is a graduate of The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and also has an MA and BA in Economics from Syracuse University. His journalism career started with an internship at The Journal of Commerce and later The Wall Street Journal. He was a freelance reported for The New York Times' metro news desk. He was an investigative news reporter for The City Sun and deputy managing editor, and is a contributor to the Huffington Post.
The Impact of Belgian Colonization on the Congo
An engaging discussion exploring the role of Belgian colonization on the current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Panelists will discuss the ownership of the Congo by King Leopold II at the dawn of the 20th Century and the devastation that he wrought on the masses of Congolese. They will also delve into the more than half century colonization of the Congolese people by the Belgian state and examine the post independence, neo-colonial period. Finally, the panelists will discuss the current global social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the manner in which they are confronting the Colonial and neo-colonial legacy in an attempt to chart a new course for Congolese, Africans and Blacks globally. The film that will compliment the discussion is Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death. The panel will be recorded and consequently available for the remainder of the series.
Speakers:
Adam Hochschild, Historian, Journalist and Author of King Leopold's Ghost
Princess Esmeralda, Member of Belgian Royal Family
Michael McEachran, Researcher and Founder ENPAD
Patricia Servant, Founder Congo Love and Co-Founder, Andree Blouin Culture Center
