By Sabine CessouPosted on 30-11-2019Modified on 30-11-2019 at 20:30

Congolese director Nelson Makengo, 29, received the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) prize for his short film Nuit debout ("Up at night") on 27 November.

Night standing , sixth short film of the artist, offers 20 minutes of immersion in a night Kinshasa in the grip of "power cuts", power cuts. The film takes place on three juxtaposed screens, where we can see the inhabitants talk about this problem and solve it in their own way. The eloquent soundtrack passes from the sound of a generator to an excerpt from a radio news bulletin about the huge potential of Inga, the hydroelectric dam that could feed not only the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC ), but also a good part of Africa in electricity. In voiceover , we also hear Joseph Kabila, the former president, discuss his record.

The young director expresses himself with the same serenity that emerges from his film. The voice put, he simply states: " People no longer say they will wait for electricity, they organize and appropriate the question of light. What matters in the film is not politics, but how Congolese observe their reality wherever they are. Politics, we can not escape. In Congo, everything always brings us back to politics ... But how do we perceive all the reinvention of light? "

"The night as a metaphor"

He himself realized that Kinshasa was in the dark after returning from a two and a half month stay in Paris for the Femis Summer School in 2016. A trip that shocked him and the " Restarts " in his perceptions. " Aesthetically, it creates something temporary, but very beautiful. That's what's interesting about this precariousness: the beauty that illuminates the city . "

The film started from a photo project, to create an imaginary cartography of the city seen from the sky, with its lit neighborhoods and its extinct neighborhoods. The installation provided three different screens ... It became a film in an experimental, self-produced way, with the support of a few friends and a post-production at the Brussels art center Argos.

The short film was first part of a contemporary art installation, presented at the WIELS art center in Brussels in July 2019 in the exhibition "Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age". Nelson Makengo has installed an illuminated umbrella under which merchandise, emblem of nightlife in all the cities of the DRC, is enthroned. The film was also presented at the last Lumumbashi Biennale in October. " The audience smiled, he recognized himself ," says Bob Nelson Makengo. There is nothing new for him, but to confront something we already know in another space, it was interesting . The Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, organizer of this Biennial, underlines " the acute sense of observation and impressive visual work " at Bob Nelson Makengo. " It's good to choose the night as a metaphor, with its characters as forms of energy and light, to speak so simply of a complex question ".

Up At Night by Nelson Makengo from Twenty Nine Studio & Production on Vimeo.

A kitty of fire Kiripi Katembo Siku

If it turns alone, the author belongs to a Congolese contemporary scene that questions spaces, memory and history. He made the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, which he released in 2015, the year of the disappearance of his mentor, Kiripi Katembo Siku , talented photographer carried away by a neuro-malaria. He is the author of a series called "Urban Theater", in which he places toys borrowed from his nephew, figurines of superheroes, in the environment of his city. " I felt resistance, people said to me," Do you want to photograph our dirt? " How to photograph without Kinois feeling betrayed, assaulted? I tried once the staging of figurines. The people themselves came to stage what I wanted to photograph, it became a game . His references are primarily literary and Congolese: he quotes Sinzo Aanza , Jean Bofane and Fiston Mwanza Mujila with his book Tram 83 , in which he sees an art of "editing" that reminds him of Russian filmmakers of the Soviet period, such as Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein.

A punch in a velvet glove

His fifth film, E'ville (pun intended between Elisabethville, the colonial name of Lubumbashi, and Evil, "devil" in English), has received numerous awards, from Kigali to São Paulo to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates . This is again a punch in a velvet glove, both poetic and political. On a soundtrack that reads Lumumba's famous letter to his wife, mixing it with the sound archives of Mobutu, he films for 10 minutes the remains of a Gécamines sports center in Lubumbashi, a metaphor for the failures of the state. Congolese.

Without great means, he is himself part of the force he describes in the face of adversity. " I'm wondering how much people can withstand such a precarious reality. They are still standing. Nuit debout, it is a title inspired by the citizen movement of demonstrations against the law Working Night standing in Paris, in 2016, where people have the freedom to express themselves without being assaulted ". The title can also refer to the "Standing Parliament" of the early 1990s, in which people came to talk on street corners reading newspapers. His next project: a feature-length documentary on the same theme, around the story of a pastor and a street vendor, one touting " the light of Christ in the dark ", " the other going to sell LED torches with a rickshaw .

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