Congolese documentary filmmaker Nelson Makengo, whose feature debut, “Rising Up at Night,” won the Special Jury Award at Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel this year, is producing the Kinshasa-set documentary “Nzonzing,” from sophomore director Moimi Wezam.
A Senegal-Congo-Canada co-production, the film tells the story of four young Congolese who use their creativity to take charge of their lives in the capital city of Kinshasa, where unemployment is rife and prospects for a bright future appear bleak. Pic is slated for a 2025 release.
Makengo, who is also serving as cinematographer, said “Nzonzing” functions as a companion piece to his own prize-winning doc, which screens this week at the Durban Intl. Film Festival.
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“The junction between these two projects is the energy of Kinshasa’s resilience, which allows us to discover our own city in a new light through the people who inhabit it, a village undergoing rapid change,” he said. “This film is very close to my own artistic practice, between black humor and derision that opens up infinite possibilities.”
Set in the sprawling city of 17 million, whose inhabitants must navigate the perils of rampant crime, power cuts and flooding from the mighty Congo River, “Rising Up at Night” is Makengo’s latest venture into the nocturnal world of Kinshasa. His short film “Up at Night” won the short documentary award at IDFA in 2019 and screened at more than 100 festivals worldwide.
His first feature, which premiered in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama strand and is being repped internationally by Vienna-based sales agent Square Eyes, is an enigmatic portrait of a beleaguered city whose residents are in a constant battle to light up their homes and streets. Set against the headlines of audacious plans to build Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant in Kinshasa’s backyard, “Rising Up at Night” illuminates the perils as well as the strange beauty of an African megalopolis plunged nightly into darkness.
A Kinshasa native, Makengo said he hadn’t considered that daily reality to be anything but normal until 2016, when he left Congo for the first time. Returning from Paris he was “shocked” by the contrast, he said, “a big contrast that took me a long time to digest.”
“Kinshasa’s nights are not like those of Paris, Brussels or New York,” he said. “Here, it’s not a question of nights, but rather of the absence of electricity, of complete darkness, of a temporary period between the sunset and the dawn. Here, nights shape the way we live, the way we move through urban space like little fireflies.
“During this period of uncertainty, of questioning how I saw my city, I realized that in fact we were living in the dark, but there was no complaining, it was just a normal way of life,” he continued. “I was traumatized by the situation, angry with myself. By looking at the city through my camera, I began to realize that the desire to escape that situation was buried deep within us. The sum of all these subdued revolts is what ‘Rising Up at Night’ is all about.”
Makengo caught the filmmaking bug early on, watching movies like Jihan El-Tahri’s “Cuba, an African Odyssey” — a groundbreaking documentary about Cuba’s support for African revolutions — on the family TV. “What captivated me was the tone and rhythm of these films,” he said. “At that time, there were little ghetto cinemas in my neighborhood, but I was less interested in that, as I’d rather follow the news all day long on the radio instead. I saw in documentaries something to learn about the world beyond the Congo.”
Before long, Makengo said he “started making documentaries without realizing it.” “The idea for me was to gather family memories under a certain rhythm accompanied by music and share it with my family, then later to film the people living in my neighborhood and show them their own image during the end-of-year festivities,” he said. “I saw that it strengthened bonds between people, especially through people laughing at seeing their own image projected in the open air. It was fun. It was only later that I realized I was making a documentary.”
Written and lensed by Makengo, “Rising Up at Night” is produced by Rosa Spaliviero and Dada Kahindo Siku for Twenty Nine Studio and Production (Belgium) and Mutotu Productions (Congo), in co-production with Florian Schewe for Film Five (Germany); Michel K. Zongo for Diam Production (Burkina Faso); Marie Logie for Auguste Orts (Belgium); Samuel Feller for Magellan Films (Belgium); and Isabelle Christiaens for RTBF (Belgium). The film was developed with the support of industry labs and events including IDFAcademy, Berlinale Talents and the Durban FilmMart. It also won the top prize for films in post-production at the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops in 2020.
While festival accolades and the filmmaker’s rising profile are certainly exposing Makengo to global audiences and tastemakers, he nevertheless remains a product of Kinsaha, “this unfinished city,” as he describes it, “embedded in the demographic ferment of the 21st century, where the construction of the state and national identity remains a kind of dream, a utopia.”
“The surprise is that nobody really knows Congo or Kinshasa, and you have to expect anything,” he said. “In making this film, I’ve learned to accept myself, to be patient, like the many faces I’ve met throughout this journey.”
