Tales from the Source, Léonard Pongo (still)
TEXT: Rosa Spaliviero in conversation with Henriette Gillerot
Film producer Rosa Spaliviero supports directors to make their most daring film projects with a strong social or political dimension. She is the co-founder of Twenty Nine Studio & Production, an independent creative organization working internationally and rooted locally in Brussels. As a film company, Twenty Nine focuses mainly on creative documentaries and artists’ films, mostly from African or diasporic directors and writers. In the context of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, I decided to talk to her about her work as a producer, the challenges of the film industry and global North-South relations, and the similar values of being a producer and a curator.
Henriette Gillerot (H.G): Could you start by telling us about your professional career and how Twenty Nine Studio & Production came to be, and what its aims and ambitions are?
Rosa Spaliviero (R.S): I studied cinema, aesthetics and film analysis in Belgium. As I was born and grew up in Dakar, Senegal, I felt that the study and knowledge of African cinema, in its plurality, was missing. As soon as I finished my studies, I started watching African films on my own and I had the very interesting experience of going to Maputo in Mozambique in 2006. I worked for a documentary film festival called Dockanema. That’s where I met filmmakers and producers.
As I founded a film club in Maputo (Cineclube Komba Kanema), I learned a lot about documentaries and films from the African continent. I met Sammy Baloji at that time and lived between Maputo and Lubumbashi. In Lubumbashi, we decided to create a biennial with other artists and cultural operators, the Picha Encounters (now called the Lubumbashi Biennial), initially focusing on photography, video and film. The first edition was held in 2008 and focused mostly on photography exhibitions and film screenings. Through this format, I discovered Congolese cinema and invited filmmakers or representatives of Congolese cinema from Bukavu, Goma and Kinshasa to Lubumbashi. We showed about thirty Congolese films during this first edition, shorts and features.
This was followed by an experience in production management for the feature film A República di Mininus (2012) by Flora Gomes. I assisted production designer and art director Tim Pannen for several months, managing a German and Mozambican crew of 20 people and a substantial budget to set up the film’s art direction. That was the first time that I understood the magic of making a film: from a script to a concrete set, with décor, props and a crew.
I went back to Belgium where I started to work at the Atelier Graphoui in a very particular production process based on experimentation. It was about producing by looking, researching and experimenting, not about producing to get a result that fits into the framework of the traditional film industry with its genres and codes.
Today, I can say that my experience as a producer was shaped by this work experience at the Atelier Graphoui in Brussels. But as I had to work mainly within a specific framework of Belgian films (that was our first mission as Atelier Graphoui is a non-profit organization supported by the Cinema Centre of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels), I started to get frustrated with these boundaries. Soon, Sammy and I decided to set up a company: it allowed us to meet Sammy’s needs, in terms of research and production in the visual arts, and to produce films, which was something that interested me personally. As such, Twenty Nine Studio & Production came about and was first and foremost a tool to enable us to do what we wanted to do. Twenty Nine Studio & Production is synonymous with independence, which means a lot of risk, but also a lot of freedom. With time, the studio and production house grew. Today we are a small team, all contributing to research, creation and production.
H.G: How do you select the directors or screenwriters, or perhaps other production companies, you work with?
R.S: Defining an editorial line is a complex thing. In my opinion, it is a question of experience, of lived experience, but also of experimentation and of language. How do you tell a story of a shared world? It’s about giving a voice and therefore a place to people or authors who don’t necessarily have the same access to the means of production as most Europeans. I am interested in the ways in which filmmakers attempt to tell stories from their own contexts, both for the new narrative forms they propose and for the perspectives they offer on contemporary social and political history – perspectives that are mostly unrepresented.
H.G.: How do you choose projects you work on?
R.S: The starting point is an encounter with a filmmaker and their project. It’s about whether a story touches me and how relevant it is to produce it, present it, give it visibility, resources and tools. Then there is the question of strategy, or how a story can be put into a film and in what way this is actually feasible. There is never a clear, efficient economical system to work with. To be honest, it is a constant challenge and struggle.
As a producer, I try to translate the vision of a filmmaker, to help give birth to the writing while keeping an eye on finding financial resources. Production is about mediation and working with the filmmaker to get the meaning of their project: why this film? For whom is this film? Above all, as a producer, I am looking for experimentation and innovation or, in other words, for new ways of making cinema.
H.G: Do you always keep the question of the audience in mind while working on films? How does that rhyme with experimentation?
R.S: Experimentation and experience are first and foremost. In the film industry, it’s getting harder to release films in cinemas. I think my first audience is the audience of festivals. It is possible to show original and out of the ordinary films in these contexts. It’s also important for me to make films that are timeless, films that people will still want to see in twenty years’ time. There are films like that that have made history, like Touki Bouki (1973) by Djibril Diop Mambety, which for me is one of the benchmark films. He fought to make that film and when he released it, it was very poorly received by the public. Now it’s part of cinema’s history.
H.G.: What if the lack of resources and infrastructure means that you end up having an experimental vision of everything you do?
R.S: That’s a good question. There are African countries – Senegal, for example – that are realising that cinema is important both in terms of the country’s cultural identity, but also as a form of industry that creates jobs. As such, the Senegalese government has set up a film support fund called FOPICA, which is a public state fund. Nowadays, there are also very selective funds linked to film festivals that want to give visibility to films from all over the world and have therefore set up their own financial institutions to produce films from the South. However, the selection rate is low and is very competitive, and if you get the funding, it is still a financial puzzle. So, it is still the prerogative of very few people to succeed.
In Congo and Senegal, there have also been a lot of production workshops and labs set up for about ten years now. There is thus a growing number of producers on the continent, but it is still far from being widespread.
H.G: Do you think that the Nollywood industry could be replicated in places like Senegal or Congo? Is it an industry that appeals to you?
R.S.: That’s a big question. First of all, all the funds I mentioned earlier are cultural and selective, and therefore public. Nollywood is different, it’s an industry. Even if I’m not a fan of commercial genre films, I think all kinds of films deserve to exist. Nollywood is mostly about consumption and entertainment, that is not what I am doing. For the first time, I am producing a genre film, but it is still an experimental film. It’s a short horror film, in a way dealing with political issues related to mining and the environment and the impact of these issues on people’s bodies in Congo.
In fact, that’s part of my editorial line, because it’s the singular point of view that interests me. I am interested in making films that show a different perspective, a different way of looking at things. Stories that come from Senegal or from Congo are just as important as ones that come from Belgium.
Léonard Pongo’s film, Tales from the Source (2024), is a great example here. The film is a look at the Congolese landscape not only as an area of exploitation and war, but also as an area of resources, life and creation. Who has seen a film from this point of view? It’s an original creation. Pongo was born and raised in Belgium but has inherited a Congolese culture at home. He travels back and forth to Congo to meet his family and spend time there. He also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. It’s a real exchange.
H.G: Coming back to this important moment of meeting and exchanging ideas, how do you meet people?
R.S: I have known Congolese artists and filmmakers since 2006, which is a long time. I like thinking of the people I work with as a constellation. The documentary Rumba Rules, New Genealogies (2020) illustrates this well: in 2015, Kiripi Katembo Siku, a great Congolese artist, filmmaker and producer died unexpectedly. He was someone for whom I had enormous respect and esteem. I contacted his family to organise a tribute to him and his cinematographic work in Brussels, at the CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archive of Belgium, preserving and screening films since 1938). We presented his entire filmography, as well as films for which he was an assistant director or producer. During these events, I met David N. Bernatchez who was working on Rumba Rules with Sammy Baloji and Kiripi, who was also acting as co-producer. As Kiripi suddenly passed away, I decided to co-produce the project; it made sense to me to finish the work that he started.
H.G: Do you pass on the values of your work as a producer when you work as a curator? How are you involved in the Lubumbashi biennial and how is this art event evolving?
R.S: The Lubumbashi Biennial is for me, once again, a story of encounters, reciprocity and sharing. Lubumbashi is a city with a lot of artists, a lot of stories to tell, but where there are no platforms, no financial means or no support from the state to activate these stories. The starting point of the biennial is a collective challenge and exchange of means and knowledges.
The first edition of the biennial was quite small, in terms of the team, the number of artists and the budget. Then, from 2010, the biennial started to grow, also in terms of artistic direction and guest curators we would invite. For example, we worked together with Elvira Dyangani Ose, Toma Muteba and Sandrine Colard. We wanted to show that, although the Lubumbashi Biennial is a local initiative made up of a group of people keen to do something different and present local artists and work, it is an international platform for national and international artists.
After having organised biennials that reached out very far, we have now decided to reformulate it, to do something smaller, but with a longer time span. We know now that some aspects of the biennial don’t fit in with the budgetary feasibility or the human resources we have. For the next editions, we are putting more emphasis on the Picha Art and Research Centre, a small house where we can organise artists’ talks, screenings and workshops. We want to be rooted and dynamic in the local networks of Lubumbashi.
H.G: I would like to go back to your work as a producer, which seems closely linked to the work of a curator. Has there been a change in recent years in the way festivals receive the kind of films you make? Has there been a greater openness to experimental films?
R.S: Festivals are exactly the places where you can show extraordinary cinema, a unique vision. However, they are as these selective funds I spoke about earlier. For me, the question is more political. We have to make films in a certain way to get them selected. And I think that’s a point we could still work on. If you don’t follow the specific codes of documentary filmmaking, you won’t get funding. Why is that? It’s a political question linked to North-South relations, which is another important debate.
In my work, I ask myself the question you ask here everyday. There is often a lot of legal and financial responsibility in the hands of the producer, which puts a lot of pressure on my work. Why not share the responsibility with all the people working on a film? The director, the writer… What is fair in terms of money sharing and responsibility sharing? How much of the film’s income does the producer get compared to the director? For me, all this is very complicated in a North-South relationship. My privileged position is the one of a Belgian producer and I work with African artists and filmmakers. What does this relationship mean? How could we rebuild a system to create a relationship of equality and reciprocity? It is a difficult quest, a search for new ways of doing things and an object of reflection as well as a subject of research and debate with colleagues.
H.G: Is this quest part of your plans for the next five years?
R.S: I want to continue with what I am doing, but at the same time I want to go further. The economy of the industry for which I produce films is very precarious and the big challenge for the next five years is to enter the cinema with a capital C, which is to make a fiction. The challenge is to see how I can remain in a dynamic where I want to be, searching for a language that is mine within the thought field of fiction. 2024 was a great year with Tongo Saa by Nelson Makengo, Kouté Vwa by Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Tales from the Source by Léonard Pongo. I feel strong, but at the same time I see that the challenges are great. What drives me is commitment and passion but, within a difficult system of financing and support for the type of films I want to bring to life, I also have to consider the feasibility of the projects.
Interview translated by Henriette Gillerot.
Film producer Rosa Spaliviero supports directors to make their most daring film projects with a strong social or political dimension. She is the co-founder of Twenty Nine Studio & Production, an independent creative organization working internationally and rooted locally in Brussels. As a film company, Twenty Nine focuses mainly on creative documentaries and artists’ films, mostly from African or diasporic directors and writers. In the context of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, I decided to talk to her about her work as a producer, the challenges of the film industry and global North-South relations, and the similar values of being a producer and a curator.
Henriette Gillerot (H.G): Could you start by telling us about your professional career and how Twenty Nine Studio & Production came to be, and what its aims and ambitions are?
Rosa Spaliviero (R.S): I studied cinema, aesthetics and film analysis in Belgium. As I was born and grew up in Dakar, Senegal, I felt that the study and knowledge of African cinema, in its plurality, was missing. As soon as I finished my studies, I started watching African films on my own and I had the very interesting experience of going to Maputo in Mozambique in 2006. I worked for a documentary film festival called Dockanema. That’s where I met filmmakers and producers.
As I founded a film club in Maputo (Cineclube Komba Kanema), I learned a lot about documentaries and films from the African continent. I met Sammy Baloji at that time and lived between Maputo and Lubumbashi. In Lubumbashi, we decided to create a biennial with other artists and cultural operators, the Picha Encounters (now called the Lubumbashi Biennial), initially focusing on photography, video and film. The first edition was held in 2008 and focused mostly on photography exhibitions and film screenings. Through this format, I discovered Congolese cinema and invited filmmakers or representatives of Congolese cinema from Bukavu, Goma and Kinshasa to Lubumbashi. We showed about thirty Congolese films during this first edition, shorts and features.
This was followed by an experience in production management for the feature film A República di Mininus (2012) by Flora Gomes. I assisted production designer and art director Tim Pannen for several months, managing a German and Mozambican crew of 20 people and a substantial budget to set up the film’s art direction. That was the first time that I understood the magic of making a film: from a script to a concrete set, with décor, props and a crew.
I went back to Belgium where I started to work at the Atelier Graphoui in a very particular production process based on experimentation. It was about producing by looking, researching and experimenting, not about producing to get a result that fits into the framework of the traditional film industry with its genres and codes.
Today, I can say that my experience as a producer was shaped by this work experience at the Atelier Graphoui in Brussels. But as I had to work mainly within a specific framework of Belgian films (that was our first mission as Atelier Graphoui is a non-profit organization supported by the Cinema Centre of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels), I started to get frustrated with these boundaries. Soon, Sammy and I decided to set up a company: it allowed us to meet Sammy’s needs, in terms of research and production in the visual arts, and to produce films, which was something that interested me personally. As such, Twenty Nine Studio & Production came about and was first and foremost a tool to enable us to do what we wanted to do. Twenty Nine Studio & Production is synonymous with independence, which means a lot of risk, but also a lot of freedom. With time, the studio and production house grew. Today we are a small team, all contributing to research, creation and production.
H.G: How do you select the directors or screenwriters, or perhaps other production companies, you work with?
R.S: Defining an editorial line is a complex thing. In my opinion, it is a question of experience, of lived experience, but also of experimentation and of language. How do you tell a story of a shared world? It’s about giving a voice and therefore a place to people or authors who don’t necessarily have the same access to the means of production as most Europeans. I am interested in the ways in which filmmakers attempt to tell stories from their own contexts, both for the new narrative forms they propose and for the perspectives they offer on contemporary social and political history – perspectives that are mostly unrepresented.
H.G.: How do you choose projects you work on?
R.S: The starting point is an encounter with a filmmaker and their project. It’s about whether a story touches me and how relevant it is to produce it, present it, give it visibility, resources and tools. Then there is the question of strategy, or how a story can be put into a film and in what way this is actually feasible. There is never a clear, efficient economical system to work with. To be honest, it is a constant challenge and struggle.
As a producer, I try to translate the vision of a filmmaker, to help give birth to the writing while keeping an eye on finding financial resources. Production is about mediation and working with the filmmaker to get the meaning of their project: why this film? For whom is this film? Above all, as a producer, I am looking for experimentation and innovation or, in other words, for new ways of making cinema.
H.G: Do you always keep the question of the audience in mind while working on films? How does that rhyme with experimentation?
R.S: Experimentation and experience are first and foremost. In the film industry, it’s getting harder to release films in cinemas. I think my first audience is the audience of festivals. It is possible to show original and out of the ordinary films in these contexts. It’s also important for me to make films that are timeless, films that people will still want to see in twenty years’ time. There are films like that that have made history, like Touki Bouki (1973) by Djibril Diop Mambety, which for me is one of the benchmark films. He fought to make that film and when he released it, it was very poorly received by the public. Now it’s part of cinema’s history.
H.G.: What if the lack of resources and infrastructure means that you end up having an experimental vision of everything you do?
R.S: That’s a good question. There are African countries – Senegal, for example – that are realising that cinema is important both in terms of the country’s cultural identity, but also as a form of industry that creates jobs. As such, the Senegalese government has set up a film support fund called FOPICA, which is a public state fund. Nowadays, there are also very selective funds linked to film festivals that want to give visibility to films from all over the world and have therefore set up their own financial institutions to produce films from the South. However, the selection rate is low and is very competitive, and if you get the funding, it is still a financial puzzle. So, it is still the prerogative of very few people to succeed.
In Congo and Senegal, there have also been a lot of production workshops and labs set up for about ten years now. There is thus a growing number of producers on the continent, but it is still far from being widespread.
H.G: Do you think that the Nollywood industry could be replicated in places like Senegal or Congo? Is it an industry that appeals to you?
R.S.: That’s a big question. First of all, all the funds I mentioned earlier are cultural and selective, and therefore public. Nollywood is different, it’s an industry. Even if I’m not a fan of commercial genre films, I think all kinds of films deserve to exist. Nollywood is mostly about consumption and entertainment, that is not what I am doing. For the first time, I am producing a genre film, but it is still an experimental film. It’s a short horror film, in a way dealing with political issues related to mining and the environment and the impact of these issues on people’s bodies in Congo.
In fact, that’s part of my editorial line, because it’s the singular point of view that interests me. I am interested in making films that show a different perspective, a different way of looking at things. Stories that come from Senegal or from Congo are just as important as ones that come from Belgium.
Léonard Pongo’s film, Tales from the Source (2024), is a great example here. The film is a look at the Congolese landscape not only as an area of exploitation and war, but also as an area of resources, life and creation. Who has seen a film from this point of view? It’s an original creation. Pongo was born and raised in Belgium but has inherited a Congolese culture at home. He travels back and forth to Congo to meet his family and spend time there. He also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. It’s a real exchange.
H.G: Coming back to this important moment of meeting and exchanging ideas, how do you meet people?
R.S: I have known Congolese artists and filmmakers since 2006, which is a long time. I like thinking of the people I work with as a constellation. The documentary Rumba Rules, New Genealogies (2020) illustrates this well: in 2015, Kiripi Katembo Siku, a great Congolese artist, filmmaker and producer died unexpectedly. He was someone for whom I had enormous respect and esteem. I contacted his family to organise a tribute to him and his cinematographic work in Brussels, at the CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archive of Belgium, preserving and screening films since 1938). We presented his entire filmography, as well as films for which he was an assistant director or producer. During these events, I met David N. Bernatchez who was working on Rumba Rules with Sammy Baloji and Kiripi, who was also acting as co-producer. As Kiripi suddenly passed away, I decided to co-produce the project; it made sense to me to finish the work that he started.
H.G: Do you pass on the values of your work as a producer when you work as a curator? How are you involved in the Lubumbashi biennial and how is this art event evolving?
R.S: The Lubumbashi Biennial is for me, once again, a story of encounters, reciprocity and sharing. Lubumbashi is a city with a lot of artists, a lot of stories to tell, but where there are no platforms, no financial means or no support from the state to activate these stories. The starting point of the biennial is a collective challenge and exchange of means and knowledges.
The first edition of the biennial was quite small, in terms of the team, the number of artists and the budget. Then, from 2010, the biennial started to grow, also in terms of artistic direction and guest curators we would invite. For example, we worked together with Elvira Dyangani Ose, Toma Muteba and Sandrine Colard. We wanted to show that, although the Lubumbashi Biennial is a local initiative made up of a group of people keen to do something different and present local artists and work, it is an international platform for national and international artists.
After having organised biennials that reached out very far, we have now decided to reformulate it, to do something smaller, but with a longer time span. We know now that some aspects of the biennial don’t fit in with the budgetary feasibility or the human resources we have. For the next editions, we are putting more emphasis on the Picha Art and Research Centre, a small house where we can organise artists’ talks, screenings and workshops. We want to be rooted and dynamic in the local networks of Lubumbashi.
H.G: I would like to go back to your work as a producer, which seems closely linked to the work of a curator. Has there been a change in recent years in the way festivals receive the kind of films you make? Has there been a greater openness to experimental films?
R.S: Festivals are exactly the places where you can show extraordinary cinema, a unique vision. However, they are as these selective funds I spoke about earlier. For me, the question is more political. We have to make films in a certain way to get them selected. And I think that’s a point we could still work on. If you don’t follow the specific codes of documentary filmmaking, you won’t get funding. Why is that? It’s a political question linked to North-South relations, which is another important debate.
In my work, I ask myself the question you ask here everyday. There is often a lot of legal and financial responsibility in the hands of the producer, which puts a lot of pressure on my work. Why not share the responsibility with all the people working on a film? The director, the writer… What is fair in terms of money sharing and responsibility sharing? How much of the film’s income does the producer get compared to the director? For me, all this is very complicated in a North-South relationship. My privileged position is the one of a Belgian producer and I work with African artists and filmmakers. What does this relationship mean? How could we rebuild a system to create a relationship of equality and reciprocity? It is a difficult quest, a search for new ways of doing things and an object of reflection as well as a subject of research and debate with colleagues.
H.G: Is this quest part of your plans for the next five years?
R.S: I want to continue with what I am doing, but at the same time I want to go further. The economy of the industry for which I produce films is very precarious and the big challenge for the next five years is to enter the cinema with a capital C, which is to make a fiction. The challenge is to see how I can remain in a dynamic where I want to be, searching for a language that is mine within the thought field of fiction. 2024 was a great year with Tongo Saa by Nelson Makengo, Kouté Vwa by Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Tales from the Source by Léonard Pongo. I feel strong, but at the same time I see that the challenges are great. What drives me is commitment and passion but, within a difficult system of financing and support for the type of films I want to bring to life, I also have to consider the feasibility of the projects.
Interview translated by Henriette Gillerot.
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