Rising Up at Night
Tongo Saa- CONGO (DRC), BELGIUM, GERMANY, BURKINA FASO, QATAR / 2024 / Lingala / Color / DCP / 96 min
Director, Script, Photography: Nelson Makengo
Editing: Inneke Van Waeyenberghe
Sound: Franck Moka
Music: Bao Sissoko, Wouter Vandenabeele
Producers: Rosa Spaliviero, Dada Kahindo Siku
Co-Producers: Florian Schewe, Michel K. Zongo, Marie Logie, Samuel Feller, Isabelle Christiaens
Production Companies: Twenty Nine Studio & Production, Mutotu Productions
Co-Production Companies: Film Five, Diam Production, Auguste Orts, Magellan Films, RTBF
World Sales: Square Eyes
Kinshasa, Congo. Ravaged by floods, half the city is underwater, and people carry on with their lives by wading through the water that has invaded even the insides of their homes. The view from atop the hill lacks the brightness of a capital city, because the electric cables that were supposed to bring power were stolen, and darkness now blankets the city. In this situation, all that people can do is offer prayers to God. From within the shadows, the music of prayer rises up. People sing, dance, praise the divine, and surrender themselves to ecstasy. However, the New Year’s celebrations turn to the sorrow of a funeral after a man’s death by electric shock. At dawn, children are ferried to school by canoe. As they glide across the water, they offer quiet smiles. (AK)
[Director’s Statement] I enter into the depths of the workingclass neighborhood of Kinshasa, into the absurdity of the rubble of endless nights, where young people of my age have stopped dreaming because they have to survive from one day to the next. I film the eyes of people marked by their distrust or even disinterest in the political promises that have kept us in a state of “waiting” or slavery since the country’s independence. I tell the story of Kinshasa, this unfinished city, embedded in the demographic ferment of the twenty-first century, where the construction of the state and national identity remains a kind of dream, a utopia. Meanwhile, the population is reinventing the question of individual illumination to counter the darkness, the personal and collective shadows. What is the beauty in all this? It’s about self-enlightenment.
Filmmaker whose work oscillates between contemporary art and film. His film Nuit debout (Up at Night, 2019, Best Short IDFA 2019) was nominated as one of the best fifty films of 2020 in a BFI critics poll. E’ville (2018) won the Sharjah Art Foundation Award at the Videobrasil Biennale in 2019. In recent years, Nelson Makengo has collaborated as a director with Al Jazeera and Meta, has been a jury member of several festivals and is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Fellow and Doha Film Institute Fellow. This is his first feature documentary.