Notícias

In Omen, one fractured family attempts to reconcile two irreconcilable yet inextricable realities, that of the Republic of the Congo and its one-time colonial possessor, Belgium. In his feature directorial debut, Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji avoids romanticizing either, preferring to depict their uneasy relation as it manifests in family squabbles.

The film is broken up into four sections, each with their own mood and color palette, titled after the central characters: Koffi (Marc Zinga), Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), and Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua). These sections intersect one another, though Koffi remains the overall protagonist. Ostracized for a port-wine stain birthmark that his family sees as a sign of evil sorcery, he returns from Belgium to the Congo after many years, hoping to obtain his parents’ blessing to marry Alice (Lucie Debay), his white Belgian fiancée, who’s pregnant with twins. From the outset, nothing goes as planned.

Omen makes...

Editor’s Note: This review originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Utopia will release “Omen” in theaters Friday, April 12.

One of the innumerable tragedies that have resulted from the decades-long strife in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the suffocation of any kind of national cinema. For most of this century, the nation’s capital, Kinshasa, has not even had a film theater; due to chronic funding difficulties and the instability that plagues much of the country, the handful of non-documentary features about Congo that emerge are largely financed by foreign players.

“Omen,” the feature debut by hip-hopper-turned-filmmaker Baloji, is a Belgian, Dutch, and Congolese co-production, and even as it offers a deeply felt look at Congolese customs, sensibilities, and family dynamics, it foregrounds its own European perspective. What results is an intriguingly ambivalent reckoning with Baloji’s mother country, a genre-hopping, beautifully slippery exploration of Congolese belief systems...

Leon Gast, the Academy Award-winning director behind sport documentary “When We Were Kings,” died on Monday, according to Meira Blaustein, his close friend and the co-founder of Woodstock Film Festival. He was 85.

Blaustein shared the news of Gast’s death in a Facebook post. “He was a giant of a filmmaker, an absolute joy of a human being, and a very dear and beloved friend,” Blaustein wrote. “I am so grateful that I got to visit with him yesterday, tell him how much I loved him, how much he meant to all of us. I only wish I had stayed longer.”

“When We Were Kings,” which won best documentary feature at the 1997 Oscars, explores the iconic boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali that took place in Kinshasa, Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. Featuring historical footage and new interviews, the doc also examines the...

Today in history... September 7, 1997... Congo/Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, died in exile in Morocco, from prostate cancer. On film, you'll find Mobutu (played by Alex Descas) in Raoul Peck's highly-recommended 2000 film, Lumumba - the story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Mobutu isn't prominently featured, as it is Lumumba's story; the film ends with Mobutu seizing power and taking control of the region, on September 14, 1960, in a coup backed by the American CIA (Lumumba was eventually assassinated, as the film...

The story of the iconic African leader rushes a bit, though it's through history so dramatic it's hard to contain in a movie

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: B+

Independence leader Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo when Belgian imperial rule ended in 1960. He was soon deposed in a military coup. Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko) took power.

Politics

Patrice Lumumba (Eriq Ebouaney) travels to Léopoldville, capital of what was then the Belgian Congo, to work as a beer salesman. One of his first customers is Joseph Mobutu (Alex Descas), who becomes a friend and ally. This was director Raoul Peck's second Lumumba movie, after a 1992 documentary, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, which may explain why he gallops at breakneck speed through the material. It's not often the viewer feels a historical film should actually be longer,...

The award-winning thriller Viva Riva! could fire an interest in home-grown African productions rather than foreign imports

Its gritty portrayal of sex, violence and gangsters in Kinshasa will come as little surprise to people who live there. The unknown quantity is how Congolese film Viva Riva! will play from Kenya to Senegal, from Zimbabwe to Burkina Faso.

The award-winning thriller is set for release in an unprecedented 18 African countries, its producers say, signalling hopes that a new generation of African cinema-goers will watch home-grown productions instead of foreign imports.

Viva Riva! is the first film shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the industry was shut down by President Mobutu Sese Seko 25 years ago.

Along with special screenings in Kinshasa, it has gone on release in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland and Uganda, with more states in central and west Africa to come.

"We want to...

Today in history… September 7, 1997… Congo/Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, died in exile in Morocco, from prostate cancer.

On film, you’ll find Mobutu (played by Alex Descas) in Raoul Peck’s 2000 film, Lumumba - the story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba – a film that’s been previously mentioned on this blog. Mobutu isn’t prominently featured, as it is Lumumba’s story; the film ends with Mobutu seizing power and taking control of the region, on September 14, 1960, in a coup backed by the American CIA (Lumumba was eventually assassinated, as the film shows).

He renamed the country Zaire, and thus began his 30-year long totalitarian reign of violence, repression, and corruption, as he became one of the richest and most feared men in the world.

Also...

The film poster for Between the Cup and the Election, which makes its U.S. premiere April 9 at Walter Reade Theater during the 17th New York African Film Festival. Ask nearly anyone living outside of central Africa to name the biggest sports news to come out of Zaire in 1974, and you’re likely to get the same response: the heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in Kinshasa in October of that year. The legendary bout—packaged by Don King, funded by Mobutu Sese Seko, and known to all as the Rumble in the Jungle—reinstated Ali as world champion and outlandish showman, while giving rise to the rope-a-dope strategy that would see Ali through to the end of his career. But for those living in Kinshasa and throughout the rest of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the year 1974 is important for another, more bittersweet,...

If the eyes of the world were on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, in October 1974 they were, perhaps understandably, focused more keenly on Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight title challenge against the indomitable human wrecking ball, George Foreman - a fight for which The Greatest displayed his characteristic bombast and preternatural confidence but which many educated observers feared might end in tragedy for the Louisville Lip - than on the three-night music spectacular that had been put together to support it. Yet in many ways the concert was as symbolic as, if not more so than, the fight itself. Soul Power is an absorbing, insightful and hugely entertaining documentary about that concert, from inception to performance, pieced together by director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte from extensive footage omitted from the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings, on which he worked as editor. Just as the real star of the ring was always Ali, in...

"Nobody knows what happened that night in Katanga," and so begins a tremendously important film about the first elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who served for mere months in 1960 and was permanently removed under still-mysterious circumstances 40 years ago Wednesday.

Incredibly, Haitian director Raoul Peck's often brilliant, utterly absorbing "Lumumba" screened Monday afternoon at the Nortel Palm Springs International Film Festival in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Virtually at the same moment, Congolese President Laurent Kabila, a Lumumba follower and controversial strongman, was reported assassinated in what might be a coup and what might escalate a three-year conflict that some have called Africa's first world war.

A Zeitgeist Films release for summer that couldn't possibly be timelier for educating American audiences about the miserable legacy of European colonialism and Cold War politics, "Lumumba" is serious and disturbing. There's a large cast of historical figures, including a chilling portrait of Mobutu Sese Seko (nee Joseph Mobutu), the general who came to power in a 1965 coup, changed the name of the country to Zaire and was finally overthrown by the forces of Kabila in 1997.

The film opens with a depiction of Lumumba's ignominious fate -- his body and the corpses of two companions are hacked up and burned by two Belgian soldiers one Windy Night far away from any witnesses. With a voice-over of the French-speaking Lumumba (Eric Ebouaney) from beyond death's door -- the film's one notable break from a stringently realistic approach -- the nearly two-hour film skips his early life and begins in earnest when the passionate activist first becomes a popular leader in Stanleyville (now Kisangani).

The very complex historical events are deftly illuminated given the potentially huge cast (President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, U.N. secretary general Dag Hammarksjold, Ernesto "Che" Guevara) and mountains of material. In the film's accompanying publicity, Peck (who made the documentary "Lumumba, Death of a Prophet") details how the project evolved, including early screenplay drafts that worked in the cliche of a white character to help open up the story to nonethnic audiences.

Thankfully, Peck and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer stay focused on the key events and such relationships as that of Lumumba with the Congo's first president, Joseph Kasavubu (Maka Kotto), as the two try to hold the country together against difficult odds. Lumumba and Kasavubu were elected by popular vote in the large, fractious country rich in natural resources soon after independence from Belgium. As so horrifically burned in Western conscience by Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Belgium ruthlessly exploited the Congo for most of the 80 years it claimed it as a colony (think the city of Los Angeles ruling over the state of Texas in terms of size difference) and to this day has close ties with the country.

After imprisonment and torture for organizing opposition, Lumumba is allowed to attend the conferences in Brussels that made independence a thorny reality. With a faithful wife (Mariam Kaba) and child who he fatefully refuses to abandon when his dream of leading a united Congo comes crashing down, Lumumba becomes the enemy of powerful regional strongmen Godefroid Munungo (Dieudonne Kabongo) and Moise Tshombe (Pascal Nzonzi).

From an immediate post-election problem controlling the white officer-led national armed forces to an inability to keep his enemies from making deals with the CIA and other outside interests while himself reluctant to turn to the USSR for aid because he fears for his own life, Lumumba is swiftly and ruthlessly backed into a corner with no hope of escape. The film pulls no punches in placing the blame on Kasavubu, Kennedy and Godefroid Munungo (Dieudonne Kabongo), whose Katanga province is where Lumumba is taken to after a desperate flight from house arrest in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).

Despite the presence of new faces in nearly every scene and a flurry of names and places, "Lumumba" rates as one of the most accomplished and vital historical films to be made in a long time that also succeeds as a fully engaging moviegoing experience. The performances are outstanding. Ebouaney is dominating, and one comes to completely sympathize with this intelligent, principled man. Among many stirring highlights is Lumumba's broadcast speech in Brussels that addressed Belgium's past crimes, though one can feel his fate being sealed even at this triumphant moment.

In French and Lingala with English subtitles and filmed in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Belgium, "Lumumba" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, but one sorely recommended special engagement is an immediate screening for incoming diplomats and national-level elected leaders, including Secretary of State nominee Colin Powell and his boss.

LUMUMBA

Zeitgeist Films

JBA Prods.

Director: Raoul Peck

Screenwriters: Raoul Peck, Pascal Bonitzer

Executive producer: Jacques Bidou

Director of photography: Bernard Lutic

Production designer: Denis Renault

Editor: Jacques Comets

Costume designer: Charlotte David

Music: Jean-Claude Petit

Casting: Sylvie Brochere

Color/stereo

Cast:

Patrice Lumumba: Eriq Ebouaney

Joseph Mobutu: Alex Descas

Maurice Mpolo: Theophile Moussa Sowie

Joseph Kasavubu: Maka Kotto

Godefroid Munungo: Dieudonne Kabongo

Moise Tshombe: Pascal Nzonzi

Pauline Lumumba: Mariam Kaba

Running time -- 115 minutes

No MPAA rating...