Nelson Makengo’s Tongo Saa (Rising up at night), 2024.
Screening Event: Machini, Tales from the source and Tongo Saa (Rising up at night)
Join us for a special screening of three films produced by Twenty Nine Studio.
Tétshim and Frank Mukunday, Machini, 2019. 10 minutes.
Leonard Pongo’s Tales from the source, 2024. 39 minutes.
Nelson Makengo, Tongo Saa (Rising up at night), 2024. 95 minutes.
Machini (2019): By necessity and especially by the force of the machine we have become sleepwalking beings beings deprived of God, the damned of the earth and test subjects over the black market of history test subjects of the machine.
Tongo Saa (Rising up at night) (2024): Darkness falls over Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and its 17 million inhabitants. It is just before Christmas and people are struggling to gain access to electric light. Kudi is mobilising the residents of his Kisenso neighbourhood to collect money for a new power cable. 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. Davido is searching for a place to stay after his house was flooded by the Congo River. Together with other young men, he kills time by working out and dreams of a better future. Tongo Saa is a sensitive portrait of the residents of Kinshasa as they face the challenges of life in an environment plagued by violence and coloured by the uncertainty of tomorrow.
Tales from the Source: this film offers a gaze on the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo to translate a sense of its unfathomable power, diversity and knowledge. The scenery is presented as a character acting as a living entity and inhabited by the symbolism of Congolese traditions. The visual approach borrows techniques from multispectral imaging, resulting in an otherworldly experience with surreal lights and colour. Combined with an original musical composition by Bear Bones, Lay Low, we enter into a sensory dialogue with the landscape, an intelligent, ageless being in constant transformation that challenges our perception.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Frank Mukunday is from Lubumbashi, DRC. He is passionate about animation and works with many Congolese animators on various projects. In 2007 he joined Tétshim, Angelo Nzeka and Trésor Makonga, with whom he still works today. Tétshim was born in Kinshasa. He has drawn for years. In addition to making animated films, he is also illustrator and cartoonist of press and comics. Since 2010, Frank Mukunday and Tétshim have been producing self-taught animated films. Starting from the practice of drawing (Tétshim) and video (Frank), their duo founded the studio “Crayon de cuivre” in Lubumbashi. After two experimental films “Cailloux” and “Kukinga”, Machini is their first film made in professional production conditions.
Léonard Pongo (1988, Belgium) is a photographer and visual artist. He started as a documentary photographer who gradually included snapshots and abstraction into his approach.The Uncanny, shot in Congo DR, has earned him several international awards and world-wide recognition and is published as a monograph by Gostbooks. Primordial Earth was shown at the Lubumbashi Biennale, the Recontres de Bamako, BOZAR and Mu.ZEE. By exploring the diversity of landscapes in Congo DR, Pongo offers an allegorical imagery of the country. Imbued with a sense of magical beauty and mystical power, the landscape seen through his eyes becomes a setting to rebuild the self, and the earth becomes the source of an awareness from which tradition, philosophy and conceptions of the universe emerge. Pongo is based between Brussels and Kinshasa and shares his time between his long-term projects in Congo DR and teaching. He’s a member of The Photographic Collective.
www.lpongo.com
Nelson Makengo is a filmmaker whose work oscillates between contemporary art and film. His latest film Up at Night (Best Short IDFA 2019) has screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and has been nominated by the BFI as one of the 350 best films of 2020. 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 Documentary Film Institute and Doha Film Institute Fellow. Tongo Saa (Rising up at night) is his first feature documentary.
Working internationally and rooted locally in Brussels, Twenty Nine Studio is an independent creative organization whose strength is based on the people who make it: “Let the land belong to those who work it”. The Twenty Nine team is Sammy Baloji, Rosa Spaliviero, Estelle Lecaille, Juliette Hourçourigaray, Minne De Meyer Engelbeen and Marek Szponik.
Sammy Baloji is a visual artist and photographer. Since 2005, he has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is a ongoing research into the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as a questioning of the effects of Belgian colonization. His work highlights how identities are shaped, transformed, perverted and reinvented.
As a film company, Twenty Nine focuses mainly on creative documentaries and artists films. Producer Rosa Spaliviero supports filmmakers in their most daring film projects with a strong social or political dimension. She chooses to produce films that show an openness to the world with a unique aesthetic device.
Since 2016, Estelle Lecaille has worked as production and research manager with artist Sammy Baloji. She is an independent curator and is in charge of the art studio management. In 2021, Juliette Hourçourigaray, production manager, joined Rosa Spaliviero for the film production management. In 2022, Minne De Meyer Engelbeen, architect and curator, joins the team as art studio assistant and Marek Szponik takes care of the administrative and financial aspects of both studio and film related projects.
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