February 2025. Eastern Congo erupts into unprecedented violence as the M23-led rebel coalition, backed by Rwanda, seizes Goma and later Bukavu without resistance. In Kinshasa, far from the frontlines, the ghosts of past wars, colonial legacies, and political traumas awaken. The city becomes the theatre of an invisible tension – a place where memory, instability, and silence converge.
In this uncertain landscape, Café Kuba, the new film by David Shongo, questions how to film a country when one becomes a fugitive within it. Rejecting traditional approaches, Shongo invents a fugitive cinema – discreet, mobile, and deeply attentive.
At the heart of the film is the Café Kuba cart, a common object used by street coffee vendors. Repurposed as a mobile recording device, it navigates the city unnoticed, capturing Kinshasa’s sounds, movements, and silent fractures. The film blends documentary and fiction, introducing masked, mystical figures who embody the roots of Congo’s war: the global scramble for its strategic minerals.
Through a unique sensory experience of 3D sound and poetic visuals, Café Kuba offers an intimate, political, and radically new perspective on the Congolese capital – its violence, its resilience, and its haunted beauty.
