SCREENING & EVENT LINEUP
October 6 - 21, 2023
All events take place at Maysles Documentary Center unless otherwise indicated.
Tickets are available to purchase for a suggested donation at the cinema box office starting 1 hour before showtime,
or online through the advance ticketing links below.
October 6th - 12th
SPECIAL OFF-SITE THEATRICAL RELEASE
Co-presented with DCTV & Icarus Films
*** Location: DCTV Firehouse Cinema ***
87 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013
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Special 20% discount when you use the promo code: congodctv
COLETTE AND JUSTIN
Dir. Alain Kassanda, 2022, 89 min.
Documentary
Lingala & French, w/ English subtitles
Born in Kinshasa and living in Paris, filmmaker Alain Kassanda embodies the classic immigrant dual identity: in the Democratic Republic of Congo he is seen as French, while in France he is seen as Congolese. Determined to understand the colonial legacy from which he comes, Kassanda convinces his grandparents—Colette and Justin—to sit for a series of interviews. Together, they watch old news footage, remember a visit from the Belgian king, and recall what life was like as part of the nascent Black bourgeoisie who served the colonial administration. But COLETTE AND JUSTIN is more than a film about family reminiscences. Kassanda uses a wealth of black-and-white archival footage to tell the story, superimposing his own thoughts and his grandparents’ voices over the visuals—in effect, using the colonizers’ images against them.
Kassanda, we learn, has two heroes: Justin and inaugural Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered by secessionists in collusion with Belgium. While making the film, he realizes their lives were intertwined far more deeply than he had realized.
Beginning as one man’s search to understand himself and his roots, COLETTE AND JUSTIN is ultimately an evocative and thoughtful meditation on the intersection of political and family history, and the multi-generational destructive reach of colonialism.
Q&A w/ Director Alain Kassanda at select screenings October 6th-8th
+ More About the Film
Q&A schedule:
Filmmaker Alain Kassanda will be present for in-person Q&As at select screenings from October 6th - 8th. Congo in Harlem is providing moderators for the following screenings, so expect some great discussion!
Fri, Oct 6, 2023, 7:00pm
Moderated by Boukary Sawadogo, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Black Studies at CUNY. His research and teaching interests are focused on African cinema, documentary, and Black world experience. He recently authored the book Africans in Harlem: An Untold New York Story.
Sat, Oct 7, 2023, 1:00pm
Moderated by Bibi Ndala, the Outreach Coordinator for Friends of the Congo. She has a Masters of Public Health from NYU, with a concentration in Global Public Health, and in 2019 she launched ELAKA to educate and support expecting mothers in the DR Congo.
Sat, Oct 7, 2023, 7:30pm
Moderator Milton Allimadi is a Ugandan-American author, journalist, professor, and a co-founder of Black Star News. He is known for his critical writing on racism in literature, including his 2003 book The Hearts of Darkness and his 2021 Manufacturing Hate.
Sun, Oct 8, 2023, 1:00pm
Born in Kinshasa and raised in Paris, Moderator Natacha Ikoli is a filmmaker, artist, and colorist, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is director of the documentary Bana Congo Oyez! (2019), which chronicles a member of Congo's National Assembly, and her work as a colorist includes Joonam (2023) and Invisible Beauty (2023).
COLETTE AND JUSTIN
“Powerfully re-employs Belgian colonial footage… Explores the complexities and ambiguities of the colonial reality… A crucial recovery of long-suppressed history.”
—Documentary Magazine
"The personal scope to the story draws audiences in... Films like this humanize historical events and allow those who lived through them to speak with their own voices. Highly recommended." —Educational Media Reviews Online
“Deeply personal, sometimes poetic, sometimes harrowing.”
—Business Doc Europe
Filmmaker bio:
Born in Kinshasa, Alain Kassanda left the DRC for France at the age of 11. He has programmed several film festivals such as Ghett’Out Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre in Boston and BAM in New York. Kassanda has also been the film programmer for the movie-theater Les 39 marches in Sevran, near Paris, for five years and created the festival A hauteur d’enfant, committed to films narrated from children’s perspectives. As a spoken word artist, Kassanda is also known as Apkass, one of the founder members of the poetry collective Chant d’encre, largely inspired by role-models like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Colette and Justin is his first feature length film, after Trouble Sleep, a mid-length documentary shot in Ibadan (Nigeria) where he lived from 2015 to 2019.
Friday, October 13th
7:00PM
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LE DAMIER – PAPA NATIONAL OYÉ (THE DRAUGHTSMEN CLASH)
Dir. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, 1996, 40 min.
Narrative
French w/ English subtitles
Set in a fictitious African country, LE DAMIER (THE DRAUGHTSMEN CLASH) is a humorous political allegory that tells the story of a sleepless dictator who spends the night playing checkers with a pot-smoking vagabond who claims to be the grand champion. However, the rules of the game entail the opponents howling vulgar and foul obscenities at one another. The champion proceeds to insult, and trounce the dictator. His reward and fate will not surprise anyone.
Restored in 2K in 2021 by NYU Tisch School of the Arts, in association with Villa Albertine – French Embassy in the United States and the Cinémathèque Afrique of the Institut Français.
Preceded by:
SPEECH FOR A MELTING STATUE
Dir. Collectif Faire-Part, 2023, 10 min.
Documentary
French w/ English subtitles
In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but an optimistic poet prepares her speech for the day it will be removed.
Archival images of colonial monuments that arrive in a museum in Kinshasa, RDC are paired with a ceremonial text by poet Marie Paule Mugeni. The voice-over presents the official removal of a Brussel’s colonial statue as if scheduled for the very next day. However, in opposition to Kinshasa, there are no concrete plans for the statues’ takedown up to now.
Saturday, October 14th
7:00PM
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BASANDJA AND THE CONGO BASIN RAINFOREST
Dir. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Panel Discussion + Film Clips
Moderated by Maliyamungu Muhande
“Basandja” is a Topoke word that expresses a traditional code of conduct for caring for the environment and ensuring balance between living beings. Join renowned filmmaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and other special guests as they discuss the notion of ancestral ecology, the theme of his latest film Basandja.
Petna is from the Yira circle of belonging. He is a descendant of the Basukali clan from Masereka and Kitamiaka lands in the eastern part of today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a Ndaliko (sacred space), he is a memory keeper and a storyteller with the Elephant kinship spirit.
Following the discussion there will be a reception with food and drink to kick off Congo in Harlem 15
+ More About the Event
Panel Moderator:
Maliyamungu Muhande is a Congolese artist and filmmaker, professor, and curator based in New York. She currently has a solo exhibition Kobikisa at The International Studio & Curatorial Program. Recently she has been selected as a Sundance Producers Lab & Summit participant. Her documentary short, ‘Nine Days a Week’ about NYC street photographer Louis Mendes, screened at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, 2020 Doc NYC festival, and was selected by the 2020 National Board of Review. She is currently developing it into a feature length film. In 2020, Muhande led a six-week summer program in partnership with ENGN Civic Creative Center and Sullivan County Center for Workforce with underserved teenagers in Monticello, New York, teaching them how to create their own documentaries. She was the curatorial advisor for curator Amy Rosenblum Martín’s (she/ella) Adjani Okpu-Egbe exhibition “on Delegitimization and Solidarity: Sisiku AyukTabe, the Martin Luther King Jr. of Ambazonia, the Nera 10, and the Myth of Violent Africa” (2021-2022) at ISCP, which Hyperallergic named one of NYC's Top 10 Exhibitions of 2021. Her most recent film , “Alive in Death”, had its New York City premiere in May at Maysles Documentary Center as an official selection of Prismatic Ground 2022 and she currently has a solo exhibition. This quadrilingual (Swahili, Lingala, French, English) artist is currently a fellow and artist-in-residence at Adobe x Sundance Ignite (2021-2022), International Studio and Curatorial Program (2022) and Creative Culture at Jacob Burns (2022). Her filmmaking and artistic practice actively refuses and unlearns colonial norms by all means necessary. Her work is rooted in inquisitiveness around identity, Blackness, and her diasporic history.
Thursday, October 19th
7:00PM
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NOUS, ÉTUDIANTS! (WE STUDENTS!)
Dir. Rafiki Fariala, 2022, 82 min.
Documentary
French w/ English subtitles
Nestor, Aaron and Benjamin are Rafiki’s closest friends. They are all studying economics at the University of Bangui. But Rafiki wants to make films and starts documenting their lives with his camera. After lectures, they hang out in front of the university or in their student accommodation and exchange ideas: about the future of their Central African Republic homeland, but also about things that immediately preoccupy them in their lives, such as dating and work. They ask themselves how things are supposed to continue. As young people with access to education, they see themselves as the ones who will shape the country in the coming decades. But how can you manage to reshape a system when so much of your energy goes into your own needs and survival?
Studying by the light of a street lamp, bursting into spontaneous bouts of dancing, hastily trading on the streets without a license – in his feature film debut, director Rafiki Fariala portrays everyday life for his friends, enabling us to gain an immediate, poetic yet clear-sighted insight into the real lives of millennials in Bangui.
Friday, October 20th
7:00PM
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PROCÈS MBAKO, ANIOTO HOMME LÉOPARD MYTHE ET RÉALITÉ (MBAKO TRIAL, ANIOTO LEOPARD MAN: MYTH AND REALITY)
Dir. Jean-Michel Kibushi Ndjate Wooto, 2023,
90 min.
Documentary
French w/ English subtitles
1933, Wamba, northeastern Belgian Congo. A man and his clan are accused of murdering accomplices of the colonial occupation, carrying out a series of shadowy leopard-like killings in the night. To the colonials he was a terrorist, for the Congolese, a hero of resistance.
PROCÈS MBAKO, ANIOTO HOMME LÉOPARD MYTHE ET RÉALITÉ chronicles the little documented saga of the Anioto-Leopard men, a secret militia that carried out the sentences of traditional leaders, killing their marks with claw like knives in the style of a leopard. Using a hybrid mix of recreations, animations, and interviews, the film explores the trial of Mbako, one of the Leopard Men leaders who was ultimately hanged for his crimes. What emerges is a complex portrait of the traditions and culture that gave rise to the Anioto Leopard Men. Who were they? What was their role in Congolese society? And what were their real or supposed mystical powers?
Saturday, October 21st
7:00PM
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LUMUMBA: RETURN OF A HERO
Dir. Quentin Noirfalisse, Benoit Feyt & Dieudo Hamadi, 2023, 86 min.
Documentary
French, Lingala & Swahili w/ English subtitles
61 years after his assassination, the remains of Patrice Lumumba are returned home – or, as his children say, “the Congo returns to Congo”. On June 30th, 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the first Prime Minister in the history of Congo, as the country gained independence after 80 years of Belgian colonial rule. An outspoken anti-colonialist, he intended to use the huge wealth of his country to benefit its people. Six months later, he was killed in the province of Katanga with his two political allies, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, and their bodies were dissolved in sulphuric acid. All that remained was a single tooth, taken from Patrice Lumumba’s dead body before it was disposed of by a Belgian police officer who held onto it until his own death in 2000.
Lumumba’s assassination was followed by the rise of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sesse Seko, who remained in power until 1996, thanks to strong western support. The events surrounding Lumumba’s death and Mobutu’s ascendance have had a lasting impact on Congo to this day.
Historical research has now proven that Belgium, the US, and the United Nations were all involved in the murders of Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo. In 2001, a parliamentary commission admitted Belgium had “a moral responsibility” in the crimes, and in 2022, the Belgian government finally took the step to officially return Patrice Lumumba’s tooth to his children’s hands.
Through the story of the repatriation of Lumumba’s tooth, LUMUMBA: RETURN OF A HERO chronicles the tragic fate of Congo’s most important political figure.
DEDICATION:
Katherine “KeKe” Kean
March 28, 1939 - July 25, 2023
We at Maysles Documentary Center would like to honor the life of our dear friend and supporter, Katherine “KeKe” Kean. In a quiet way, KeKe provided the spark that ignited the idea for Maysles Documentary Center, when she invited Albert Maysles and his family to a screening and panel discussion downtown. The experience moved the Maysles family to create an uptown venue for films and discussion, and thus the Documentary Center was born. KeKe was one of MDC’s earliest and defining curatorial voices. Her widely successful “Haiti in Harlem” film and event series set the path for the multi-faceted, social justice oriented programming we are known for today. We are deeply grateful for the beauty and inspiration KeKe brought to the world — her spirit will endure in the works she created and supported, as well as in the lives of those she touched.