In June 2020, thousands of people took to the streets in Brussels to make a fist against police brutality and institutional racism in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. For a moment, it seemed that some demonstrators would take down the statue of colonial king Leopold II in a nearby square. For now the sculpture is still standing, but poet Marie Paule Mugeni already prepares her speech for the day it will be removed.

French spoken, English subtitles

In 1962, Haitian child Raoul Peck joined his parents, working in Congo, formerly Belgian, newly independent. Two years earlier, Patrice Lumumba, a mythical figure of Congolese independence, was killed in Katanga. From a photograph found by his mother where the Congolese leader appears, the child, turned filmmaker, realizes thirty years later, a very personal and sensitive film where biography and history, testimonies and archives constitute the frame of a reflection around the figure of Lumumba, his political assassination, the media and the memory.

“Before the age of the Internet, before digital archives could be accessed, a young Congolese who wanted to speak about his own history – when he finally could access his own archive – had to pay $3,000 for a minute of archival footage in broadcasting rights. [... ] Before we left for Congo we found out that the Mobutu regime’s services were expecting us. It was too dangerous, we had to cancel the trip and lost a number of pro­ducers. As a result we took a creative decision that gave the film its strength: we decided to shoot Lumumba in Brussels, the very city where the plan to murder him was hatched. We turned a setback into a dramatic twist and in fact integrated it into the film and that in turn gave a reflexive quality to the importance of the image (both mental and as material) in the documen­tary.” (Raoul Peck)

French spoken, English subtitles

Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they’re stopped at the airport because the airline doesn’t trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home, they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center.

The filmmakers’ testimony – which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists – stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.

French spoken, English subtitles