‘Kinshasa does not fall asleep, it is in perpetual resilience’
Daniel Nelson
‘Resilience’ has become a fashionable word: politicians and NGOs use it a lot these days, If you really want to know what it means, watch Rising Up At Night.
It’s a documentary about a part of Kinshasa – never the easiest place to live – that’s been flooded for months by the river Congo and where the electricity has also ceased to work. And not inundated and powerless for hours or days, but for weeks and months.
“Kinshasa does not fall asleep, it is in perpetual resilience,” observes filmmaker Nelson Makengo of his hometown.
Filmed at night, the camera peers into the gloom as families struggle to find battery-powered LEDs. They are often filmed standing waist-high in murky water. Some residents sleep precariously on beds raised perched on bricks. A woman says she has rolled off a few times into the health-thrteatening bilge.
Other dangers lurk in the darkness, such as rape.
It’s appalling, devastating. There’s frustration and anger, but also self-help, resourcefulness, spirit, and pastors conjuring up parallels between the light of Christ and the light coming, one day, to people’s homes.
In the midst of such conditions it’s easy to see why people ferventlyn pray and sing (“Lord, take pity on my country”). It’s the last hope. Government attempts to proclaim the promised benefits of the vaunted Grand Inga Dam project seem seem almost insulting, seem to belong to a separate universe.
Yet those living in this dim, watery hell are magnificent. There are quiet, reflective moments in the gloom, intense faces concentrating on accomplishing simple tasks in impossible circumstances. But the embattled residents have energy, passion, perseverance, like the youths in a makeshift gym straining their sinews to lift weights or the meetings to collect money to buy a cable with which to restore power.
It’s not a film of facts and figures: it’s impressionistic and sometimes hard to figure out what you are seeing. But it certainly captures resilience, people making do with they have, which is almost nothing.
Rising Up At Night is showing at the BFI London Film Festival