SCREENING & EVENT LINEUP
October 13th - 19th, 2024

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 advance ticketing links.

Tickets do not guarantee a seat in the main screening room;
it is recommended that ticket holders arrive early to secure their preferred seat.
For sold-out shows, there will be overflow seating offered on the lower level of MDC.

Sunday, October 13th
5:00PM

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SOUL POWER
Dir. Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte, 2008, 92 min.

Zaire ’74, the brainchild of South African musician Hugh Masekela and American record producer Stewart Levine, was a three-day music festival that took place in Kinshasa in 1974, planned to coincide with the now legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman. SOUL POWER documents the extraordinary event, which featured musical legends James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Fania All Stars, Miriam Makeba, and others. Most of the American performers, emboldened the civil rights movement, were visiting Africa for the first time, exploring their roots and somewhat naïve beliefs about the dictator Mobuto Sese Seko. Much more than a concert film, SOUL POWER provides a dynamic fly-on-the-wall look into the turbulent proceedings, with on-the-spot commentary from the musicians and concert organizers, street life in Kinshasa, and backstage access to one of the most extraordinary concerts ever filmed.

Monday, October 14th
7:00PM

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OMEN
Dir. Baloji, 2023, 90 min.

Koffi, a young Congolese man, was disowned by his mother in his youth for being a so-called "zabolo," Swahili for evil sorcerer. Now he returns to Congo from Europe to visit his family, along with his white pregnant girlfriend. The visit does not go well as the ancient rituals and persistent superstitions of the local tribes continue to haunt him. Between Brussels, Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, OMEN borrows from magic realism to paint a portrait of undesirables and sorcerers through intertwined stories of protagonist of different genders and generations, confronted with the prejudice and suspicion of those around him.

Tuesday, October 15th
7:00PM

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COLETTE AND JUSTIN
Dir. Alain Kassanda, 2022, 89 min.

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.

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.

Wednesday, October 16th
7:00PM

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ZAIRE ‘74 – RARE OUTTAKES
From the Maysles Archive, 1974, 58 min.

Albert Maysles worked on countless productions over the course of his long and storied career, but notably, he was one of the cinematographers who traveled to Kinshasa with fellow documentarian Leon Gast to record Zaire 74, a three-day music festival leading up to the “Rumble in the Jungle” between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. The various film teams were instructed to film everything, and amassed a vast trove of footage documenting the concert promotors, musicians, celebrity guests, Ali’s boxing team, and street life in Kinshasa. It took Gast over 22 years to edit and finance the resulting film, WHEN WE WERE KINGS (1996), which has become the definitive account of this legendary event. Over a decade later, a second film, SOUL POWER (2008) was created from the concert footage that was not included in WHEN WE WERE KINGS. But there is still more material that never made it into either film – this is a selection of rarely screened outtakes from Albert Maysles’ personal archive, that will take you behind the scenes of a truly iconic and historic cultural event. 

Post-screening discussion with special guests TBA

Thursday, October 17th
5:00 - 6:30PM

***FREE off-site event***
Reserve Tickets
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY
141 Convent Ave, New York, NY 10031
Room 124
Entrance to the building is at 135th Street and Convent Avenue. Please bring a government ID to enter.

Conflict Art in the Congo: Rebellion, Occupation, and Return
A Talk and Photo Exhibit of Gbadolité Airport

Dr. Tatiana Carayannis, Leader-in-Residence, The Moynihan Center, City College of NY, and Global Affairs and Technology Advisor, Institute for Advanced Study

Dr. José Mvuezolo Bazonzi, Professor, University of Kinshasa and Coordinator, Groupe de recherche et d’études stratégiques sur le Congo (GREC) (via Zoom)

Years of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have shaped the country's landscapes, leaving behind destruction but also revealing visual traces of the past. These traces provide both insights into the lives of the former combatants and visual representations of the conflict itself. This photography exhibition explores inscriptions left by combatants during the First and Second Congo Wars at Gbadolite Airport, once a symbol of President Mobutu's luxury and power in then-Zaire. Between 1995 and 1999, successive and often opposing state armies and rebel groups occupied the airport, leaving behind charcoal inscriptions—names, drawings, religious texts, military boasts, and philosophical quotes—on its walls.

The exhibition, featuring 20 photographs, offers insights into the soldiers' experiences, desires, and attempts to memorialize their presence in combat zones. The deeply personal inscriptions speak to individual experiences and testify to war, power, subversion, and memory. Written in multiple languages including French, Lingala, English, Swahili, and Arabic, the etchings reflect the diverse groups involved—Congolese, Ugandan, Rwandan, Chadian and more. Although the 1999 Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement officially ended the war, 25 years later, the legacies of violence remain deeply etched in Congolese landscapes and lives, showing the human elements—and human toll—of war.

Thursday, October 17th
7:00PM

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TONGO SAA (RISING UP AT NIGHT)
Dir. Nelson Makengo, 2024, 96 min.

Darkness falls over Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its 17 million inhabitants struggle to gain access to electric light. Kudi mobilizes the residents of his neighborhood, Kisenso, to collect money to replace a stolen power cable in time for Christmas festivities. On Mount Mangengenge, a holy place overlooking the city, Pastor Gédéon delivers a sermon about the light of Christ as the path to life and truth. Meanwhile, Davido searches for shelter after his house was flooded by the Congo River. He kills time by working out with his friends as he waits for the river to recede from his neighborhood. TONGO SAA is a subtle, fragmented portrait of a population that, despite the challenges, is reinventing itself in an environment marked by violence, colored by the uncertainty of tomorrow and immersed in the beauty of Kinshasa’s nights.

Preceded by:
BLISS
Dir. Emily Apter and Elijah Stevens, 2023, 10 min.

A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction – precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms – this project excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

Saturday, October 19th
7:00PM

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SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT
Dir. Johan Grimonprez, 2024, 150 min.

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s engrossing essay-film examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Congo’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. The year is 1960, Voice of America Jazz Hour broadcasts the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie behind the Iron Curtain, while a wave of decolonization movements tear through the African continent and the struggle for civil rights marches on stateside. Beat by beat, Grimonprez traces Lumumba’s rise from 36-year-old independence leader to Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister—and how corporate and colonial interests, along with machinations at the United Nations, conspired in his assassination. Deeply researched, the film interweaves archival records, home movies, newly unearthed speeches by Lumumba, and published memoirs by Congolese activists and writers with the story of the Black jazz legends who defined the era in more ways than one. Pulsating with the energy of the period, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT’S chilling indictment of colonial power roars on in the present day.

Post-screening discussion with director Johan Grimonprez and Kambali Musavuli, plus a closing reception with live music by Nkumu Katalay