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Filmstill Lumene : Privatisation

Lumene : Privatisation

Lumene : Privatisation
David Shongo
International Competition Documentary Film 2023
Documentary Film
DR Congo
2022
30 minutes
French,
Lingala
Subtitles: 
English

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination.

The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate.

Borjana Gaković

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
David Shongo
Script
David Shongo
Cinematographer
Peter Miyalu
Editor
Derek Simba, David Shongo
Producer
David Shongo
Co-Producer
Nanina Guyer
Animation
Derek Simba