Rising Up at Night
(Tongo Saa)

Rising Up at Night wrests from Kinshasa’s endless nocturnal visions, fragments, faces gleaming in flashes of torchlight, while feet, knees and hips wade through ochre-coloured waters. In the suburbs, Dantesque flooding has dealt a death blow to the precarious electricity system, while voice-over news reports describe the fiasco of a colossal Hispano-Chinese project for a dam that will supposedly supply power to 80 million Congolese. Nelson Makengo lets his photographer’s eye wander over what scant light survives, given off by trinkets made in China, huckster Father Christmases, pairs of angry eyes and trance-inducing religious prayers. He anchors his film in the tradition of the urban symphony, but at the level of the canoes circulating along drowned streets in the ink-black night and the River Congo’s muddy waters. AR