A story without cinema
It's difficult to trace the history of cinema in the DRC prior to 1960, given the stranglehold the Belgian colonialists had on all film screenings in the country. Prior to independence, the occupying forces simply forbade the colonized population from watching films. As a result, and because the 1960s were also a period of instability, it wasn't until 1971 that the first Congolese short film, Moseka, was shot by Roger Kwami Mambu Zinga. A young filmmaker trained in Belgium, he would later pursue his career in high cultural positions, and won an award at the 1972 Fespaco for this first film. Mweze Ngangura's La vie est belle , the first Congolese feature-length fiction film, was released in 1987. A romance set to the music of Papa Wemba, himself the film's lead actor. Like Roger Kwami, Ngangura trained in Belgium, then traveled between Brussels, Kinshasa and other parts of Africa, making fiction and documentaries. Pièces d'identité (1998), shot in Cameroon and in the Brussels neighborhood of Matongé, won the 1999 FESPACO Grand Prix in Ouagadougou.
It's difficult to establish a real link between the different careers and themes tackled by these filmmakers, apart from the stigma of colonization. How can we rebuild ourselves, meet each other, and build new identities despite divisions, wealth gaps and ever-present tensions? To answer these questions, director Monique Mbeka Phoba has been making a number of short and feature-length films since 1991, focusing on themes such as exile, gender, domestic politics and independence. Among these, Un rêve d'indépendance (1999) won an award at the Vues d'Afrique festival in Montreal, and the filmmaker and her work have also been the subject of several recent retrospectives.
Alongside these initiatives, filmmakers such as Djo Munga are launching film schools to encourage vocations and build up the increasingly vibrant Congolese seventh art.
Filming the Congo: duty or European hobby?
While Congolese cinema still struggles to be produced and distributed beyond its borders, the DRC is the subject of numerous Belgian and international films and documentaries. These include Belgian filmmakers such as Thierry Michel and Marc-Henri Wajnberg, as well as English filmmakers such as Orlando von Einsiedel, director of Virunga (2014). While not without interest, these films remain Western viewpoints. Even so, they have helped raise the profile of the struggle of some Congolese, such as Dr. Denis Mukwege, aka The Man Who Repairs Women (2015). A film which, thanks to the resonance it brings to the titanic work accomplished by the doctor and his team, will earn Mukwege the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. Despite all this, the neo-colonialist and paternalistic outlook unfortunately sometimes tinges some of these productions. Watch with an informed eye.
