Congo – Kinshasa (Zaire)

Hundreds of young revolutionaries take to the streets of Kinshasa when Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, refuses to relinquish power at the end of his second term. Protests are met with violence, but the battle for free elections and democracy cannot be repressed.
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Sidestepping conventional approaches to narrative, Kinshasa Makambo is a ground-level account of collective action told with blistering immediacy. With his attentive, perceptive camera, Dieudo Hamadi takes to the streets for an urgent portrait of young Congolese protestors fighting for democracy.Read More »

Kongo is writing a book on the subject of immigrants but while his editor wants a kind of traveler’s book in which ethnic exotic ingredients are offered to a European audience, Kongo has more ambitious ideas – he conceives of the idea of writing a book that follows the paths of Congolese history and its many ghosts. A brave and powerful film, made with single-mind integrity. Filmed mainly in the Congo, the film also provides a slice of life of the contemporary Congolese community in Brussels.Read More »

La Vie Est Belle takes us inside the vibrant music scene of Kinshasha, Zaire’s exhilerating and exasperating capital of four million. Its back alleys and nightclubs pulsate to the beat of some of the most influential musicians in the world, and directors Ngangura Mweze and Benoit Lamy have brought it directly to the screen with their defiantly feel-good epic of charm and persistence.Read More »

A wicked political satire about African dictators, this film tells the story of the president of a fictitious African nation who spends a sleepless night playing checkers with a pot-smoking vagabond who is claimed to be the “all-around champion”. However the rules of the game entail opponents howling vulgar and foul obscenities at one another. The Champion proceeds to insult, and trounce the President. His reward – and fate – are not exactly unexpected in this hilarious send-up of living under tyranny.Read More »

Captain Thomas Sankara was the leader of the Burkinabe Revolution. This film is a biographical profile of the revolutionary, the improvements he generated in his country and the new socio-political dimension he instituted in Burkina Faso.Read More »

Kongo is writing a book on the subject of immigrants but while his editor wants a kind of traveler’s book in which ethnic exotic ingredients are offered to a European audience, Kongo has more ambitious ideas – he conceives of the idea of writing a book that follows the paths of Congolese history and its many ghosts. A brave and powerful film, made with single-mind integrity. Filmed mainly in the Congo, the film also provides a slice of life of the contemporary Congolese community in Brussels.Read More »