13th Annual Congo in Harlem Film Festival
Bukavu's sapeurs show off their style in the streets during Covid-19. Bukavu, DRC, August 2020
Congo in Harlem is an annual showcase of film, art, discussions and special events focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is the flagship event of CONGO WEEK.
Each year we present a diverse program that aims to deepen our community's understanding of Congo, but most importantly we want people to have fun! Congo in Harlem is more than just movies and discussions -- it's an opportunity to discover Congo's culture, learn about its history, and engage around its challenges.
Congo in Harlem is free and open to the public. Our 13th annual program will be presented online from October 17th - 24th. In addition to the virtual program, there will be in-person events at Maysles Documentary Center on Saturday, October 23rd and Friday, October 24. Check our website for the latest schedule, as we often add last-minute events.
*Please note: Advance tickets are available online for a $15 suggested donation. Pay what you want at the door, but seating is limited, so we recommend reserving ahead of time.
Conversations
Enough: A Dream. A Nightmare, A Musical
Monday, October 18 at 12pm EST
Liz Kimbulu, founder of BisoNaBiso engages Nathan Nzanga about his short film ENOUGH. The musical explores Nathan's journey from a quirky kid born to Congolese immigrants, to an idealistic teen artist, to a frustrated young man struggling to overcome pain and cynicism. Set against a backdrop of American culture war, the film uses dream logic to sift through Nate's most conflicted feelings about race, policing and grace in a broken world. A discussion with Nathan will follow the screening.
The Role of U.S. Tech and Auto Companies in Congo’s Mining Sector
Wednesday, October 20 at 2pm EST
Hosted by Didier Monga wa Shakapanga and featuring Terry Collingsworth, join us for an update on the court case on US technology and automobile firms’ involvement in Congo’s mining sector. Attorney Terry Collingsworth will provide an an update following the July hearings in Washington, D.C.
Local Agency and Human Dignity in Humanitarian Relief Efforts: The Case of Mount Nyiragongo Volcanic Eruption in DR Congo
Saturday, October 23 at 3pm EST
Moderated by Rev. Octavia S. Caldwell with panelists Rev. Dr. Jonathan Weaver, Petna Ndaliko, and Dr. Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, this conversation will consider innovative locally led strategies for providing sustainable and enduring relief in the face of devastating humanitarian crises. They will highlight the myriad ways in which the dignity of the victims were central to their relief intervention.
In-Person Screenings
CONGO OYÉ
Bill Stephens, 1971, 45 min, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), US
Saturday, October 23rd, 2021, 7:30PM
A rare and absolutely unknown work, made by Bill Stephens in collaboration with French filmmaker Chris Marker and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. CONGO OYÉ was never completed and long believed lost until it was unearthed several years ago on video cassette from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The film follows an exploratory visit to Africa’s first People’s Republic declared by President Marien Ngouabi.
MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
Lebert Bethune and John Taylor, 1966, 20 min, USA
Saturday, October 23rd, 2021, 7:30PM
Filmed in Paris in November 1964, just months before his assassination, MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM, portrays the civil rights leader at a time when his views were expanding to include what was going on in the world at large. In his commentary, he advocates for solidarity with Africa, underscored by images of Patrice Lumumba and Congolese independence.
+ Panel discussion with Lebert Sandy Bethune (filmmaker) and Herb Boyd (scholar, author, educator, activist), moderated by Milton Allimadi (Black Star News)
NEW YORK: SECRET AFRICAN CITY
Mark Kidel, 1989, 60 min, United Kingdom, USA
Sunday, October 24th, 2021, 4:00PM
In this rarely screened film, renowned scholar Robert Farris Thompson takes viewers on a cultural tour of New York, revealing the city’s deep African roots. He traces the salsa music of Spanish Harlem back to Congo, observes Haitian Fete Ghede, Yoruba ceremonies, Capoeira, Santeria, and hip hop, offering a time-capsule portrait of a lesser seen side of New York during its golden era.
+ Panel discussion moderated by Lubangi Muniania, with special guests TBA.
Virtual Screenings - Features
All films streaming FREE of charge, from October 17th-24th.
L'AFRIQUE EN MORCEAUX (AFRICA IN PIECES)
Jihan El-Tahri, 2001, 100 min, France
In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo, igniting the First Congo War and upsetting the balance of power in the region. 25 years later, the reverberations of this conflict are still rumbling throughout eastern Congo. Jihan El-Tahri’s 2001 film, L’AFRIQUE EN MORCEAUX (AFRICA IN PIECES), is the definitive documentary account of this bloody period in Congo’s history, depicting the intrigues, treasons, and vengeances that prevailed over those years, as various factions fought ruthlessly to increase their influence. In just ten years, the population of Congo saw its hopes vanish, challenging the dream of an Africa in control of its own destiny, self-sufficiency, and the end of interethnic conflicts.
CONGO OYÉ
Bill Stephens, 1971, 45 min, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), US
A rare and absolutely unknown work, made by Bill Stephens in collaboration with French filmmaker Chris Marker and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. CONGO OYÉ was never completed and long believed lost until it was unearthed several years ago on video cassette from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The film follows an exploratory visit to Africa’s first People’s Republic declared by President Marien Ngouabi.
KINSHASA MBOKA TÉ (KINSHASA WICKED LAND)
Douglas Ntimasiemi & Raffi Aghekian, 2013, 52 min, DR Congo
Kinshasa -- Africa’s largest city. There’s no other place else like it. It pulses with life and chaos. Beauty and tragedy are around every corner, and each day its 15 million residents must reinvent themselves to survive. KINSHASA MBOKA TÉ (KINSHASA WICKED LAND) captures the spirit of the place, following a scrappy TV news station, an artist who makes work of machetes, and a scattering of other memorable personalities. Like the city itself, the film verges on spiraling out of control, but holds together with a rock solid sense of purpose, resilience and ingenuity.
LES CREUSEURS (THE DIGGERS)
Mathieu Roy, 2021, 66 min, Canada, DR Congo
LES CREUSEURS (THE DIGGERS) is an observational portrait of artisanal miners in eastern Congo. The film shows the harsh and painful work of adolescents and young adults who extract coltan, tungsten and tourmaline in several mines in North and South Kivu. As the camera captures their repeated movement -- their pickaxes, sweat, fatigue, faces contorted by strain, their breathing -- it lays bare an unsparing record of mining’s bitter toll on the land and spirit.
NEW YORK: SECRET AFRICAN CITY
Mark Kidel, 1989, 60 min, United Kingdom, USA
In this rarely screened film, renowned scholar Robert Farris Thompson takes viewers on a cultural tour of New York, revealing the city’s deep African roots. He traces the salsa music of Spanish Harlem back to Congo, observes Haitian Fete Ghede, Yoruba ceremonies, Capoeira, Santeria, and hip hop, offering a time-capsule portrait of a lesser seen side of New York during its golden era.
PYGMIES IN PARIS
Mark Kidel, 1992, 43 min, United Kingdom
In the early 90s, Danielle Mitterand, the wife of French President François Mitterand, invited a group of Bayaka pygmies from the Central African Republic to perform at the Grand Halle de la Villette in Paris. The visit was facilitated by the government of Jean-Bédel Bokassa in C.A.R., and was the first time the Bayaka performed in a concert setting in Europe. Filmmaker Mark Kidel -- a co-founder of the celebrated WOMAD festival which helped put "world music" on the map -- was there to document the visit. What starts as a celebration unravels into an indictment that lays bare the problems of exploitation and spectacle that plague the greater world music scene.
RUMBA RULES: NEW GENEALOGIES
Sammy Baloji & David Bernatchez, 2020, 107 min, DR Congo, Belgium, France, Canada
RUMBA RULES: NEW GENEALOGIES offers a unique window into the inner workings of Brigade Sarbati Orchestra, one of Congo’s most popular contemporary musical acts. Helmed by celebrated visual artist Sammy Baloji, the film actively defies the conventions of the typical “music documentary”, instead grappling with the daily lives and internecine struggles of the ensemble’s members to present a poignant essay on self-meaning, rootedness and urban polyphony.
ZERO
Moimi Wezam, 2018, 66 min, DR Congo
Papa Wemba, the “King of Rumba Rock”, is dead. He was one of the most popular musicians of his time, and his death is mourned by millions of his fans. One of his dancers, Bénédicte Shutsha, who worked for him for fifteen years is devastated by the loss. Uncertain of what comes next, she embarks on a perilous project of returning to the studio to pay tribute, by covering his popular song “Zero.”
Virtual Screenings - Shorts
20 ANS D'AGE
(20 YEARS OF AGE)
Joseph Kasau, 2020, 10 min, DR Congo
In DR Congo, the normal course of study from kindergarten through elementary school, high school and graduate studies takes 20 years. But even after such a large investment of time, there is no guarantee of a job when opportunities are scant, and nepotism matters more than merit. Filmmaker Joseph Kasau bluntly indicts the system, questioning where his 20 years have gone.
LE CAMÉLÉON
Douglas Ntimasiemi, 2021, 11 min, DR Congo
Layering archival material with impressionistic imagery of contemporary DR Congo, director Douglas Ntimasiemi depicts the colonial history of DR Congo, told in metaphor to the chameleon, a reptile with the ability to alter its color to adapt to changes in its environment.
ENOUGH
Nathan Nzanga, 2021, 14 min, USA
Using interviews captured over a decade, ENOUGH is a hip hop film that explores Nathan Nzanga's journey from quirky kid born to Congolese immigrants, to an idealistic teen artist, to a frustrated young man struggling to overcome pain and cynicism. Set against a backdrop of American culture war, the film uses dream logic to sift through Nate's most conflicted feelings about race, policing and grace in a broken world.
HOME SWEET HOME
Franck Moka, 2020, 16 min, DR Congo
In this short work of docu-fiction, filmmaker Franck Moka resolves to isolate at home after he returns from a Covid hotspot. Soon the rumors circulate declaring him the first Covid-19 case in the city, and after death threats and stigmatization, he is forced to quarantine at an undisclosed hospital. At once dystopian and heartwarming, HOME SWEET HOME, is an extremely personal ode to life in a dark time.
KAPITA
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, 2021, 22 min, DR Congo, USA
“Ka-pi-ta” is the official job title given to Congolese charged with enforcing their white master’s bidding—through domination—over their fellow Congolese on plantations, in factories, in commerce, and other sites of capitalist extraction and production. Drawing on a wealth of footage from Belgian colonial films, director Petna Ndaliko Katondolo recodes images of extraction and intercuts them with clips of contemporary life in Congo, backed by an immersive soundscape. The kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of past and present destabilizes time itself, exposing cycles of exploitation and the collateral destruction buried in colonial infrastructure.
LETTER TO MY CHILD FROM RAPE
Bernadette Vivuya, 2020, 10 min, DR Congo
Director Bernadette Vivuya adds cinematic texture to a powerful letter written by Désanges Kabuo, a poet-advocate who braves dangerous prejudice to claim a future for the child she did not choose to have, but now loves fiercely.
MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
Lebert Bethune and John Taylor, 1966, 20 min, USA
Filmed in Paris in November 1964, just months before his assassination, MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM, portrays the civil rights leader at a time when his views were expanding to include what was going on in the world at large. In his commentary, he advocates for solidarity with Africa, underscored by images of Patrice Lumumba and Congolese independence.
MOTHER NATURE
Maisha Maene, 2020, 9 min, DR Congo
Paying homage to the iconic imagery of influential artists Kiripi Katembo and Julie Djikey, MOTHER NATURE depicts a young woman with an overflowing imagination who paints her body with motor oil to make a metaphoric statement about consumption and its consequences.
POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMA TRACK #04 (REMIX MIX) WITHIN THE MULTI-DIMENSIONAL WORLD OF BEBSON ELEMBA
Eléonore Hellio, produced by Kongo Astronauts, 2019, 14 min, France, DR Congo. Courtesy of the artists and Axis Gallery, NY & NJ
Postcolonial Dilemma Track #04 is the most recent incarnation of an infinitely remixable set of images. The film’s non-narrative journey opens with a metaphor of “extractivism,” defined by the Kongo Astronauts as the economic process of colonial and post-colonial extraction that operates simultaneously on natural resources and human subjects. The film exists in the interzone of digital globalization, where past, present and future collide with the politics of intimacy and urban life.
POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMA TRACK #05 (IN THE PROCESS OF)
Kongo Astronauts, 2021, 21 min, DR Congo. Courtesy of the artists and Axis Gallery, NY & NJ
Set among the crumbling factories on a former Unilever plantation in Lusanga (formerly Leverville), in the Kwilu Province of Democratic Republic of Congo, a UFO descends. The astronaut, accompanied by ancestral spirits from the future, struggles to regain consciousness, and together they set off through an interzone of heavy cultural overlaps.
UMLANDELI PART 1: THE BIRTH OF PRINCES
Naomie Kabila, 2021, 6 min, DR Congo
A wise old owl sets the stage for an epic tale about two young princes and their caretaker. This is the first installment of what we hope will be many more!
APA
Maisha Maene & Leo Nelki Gopfer, 2021, 3 min, DR Congo
Filmmaker Maisha Maene lays bare the volatility of eastern Congo in a sensory essay that evokes images of environmental threat, military aggression, and a young generation raised in conflict.
BILA MASK
Goma Film Collective, 2021, 10 min, DR Congo
A group of filmmakers follows walking street vendors in Goma, as they sell their wares in the city’s most densely populated neighborhood during the Covid-19 pandemic.
