Downstream to Kinshasa (Dieudo Hamadi, 2020) (Patreon)

In recent years, the documentaries of the DRC's Dieudo Hamadi have started receiving more recognition in the West. (True/False awarding him the 2018 True Vision award certainly helped raise his profile.) His latest been selected for Cannes, but of course that edition of the festival didn't happen, so Downstream to Kinshasa ended up world premiering at 2020's scaled-back TIFF. This is all to the good. Hamadi brings a unique style and perspective to his work, and I suspect that eventually he will be considered one of contemporary cinema's masters of nonfiction filmmaking, in a class with people like Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman, and Wang Bing.

Part of what sets Hamadi's films apart is a tension between pure observation and broader historical context. Downstream to Kinshasa exemplifies this approach, since it focuses on a group of individuals who self-identify based on their unfortunate proximity to global affairs. This is a film about citizens from the town of Kisangani who were maimed during the Six Day War in 2000, when Ugandan and Rwandan troops clashed on Congolese soil. These civilians, all of whom sustained loss of limbs or other major disabilities, were promised restitution but the DRC's national assembly, but as of 2019, they had still received nothing.

Rather than adopting a more conventional expository approach, Hamadi looks at this group of activists as an ecosystem of complex interpersonal relationships, as well as a comparative study of how different individuals have coped with the loss that has come to define their lives. The main action of the film occurs in the middle, when a large group of wounded war survivors set sail on a makeshift boat, making the journey from Kisangani to Kinshasa where they hope to gain an audience with the national assembly. Where a typical documentary might abbreviate the boat journey, foregrounding the citizens' eventual arrival at the capitol, Hamadi makes the trip with them, showing us the arduousness of their task. The craft resembles a huge refugee boat, but with ample cooking supplies, musical entertainment, and large amounts of fuel for the engine, But more than this, we observe the discomfort, arguments, and occasional pleasures of this varied group who were brought together by circumstance and otherwise may have little in common.

Some of the activists, though, seem to have a long history of tolerating each other. Hamadi alternates the sailing footage with excerpts from a black-box performance staged by some of the Kisangani survivors. These dramatic interludes certainly break up the sameness of the film, but they're also doing more work that might be immediately apparent. In the performance, these disabled people deliver monologues about feeling as though their lives are over, that they are worthless, or generally looked down upon in society. This is reinforced by comments heard on the boat, when one young woman, a double-amputee, offhandedly remarks that her family ignores and deprives her in hope she'll give up and commit suicide. Hamadi offers us a window into the Congolese and their retrograde attitude towards disability, and this may partly explain why the government keeps refusing to help them. Downstream to Kinshasa documents a highly public action by a group of people who are expected to simply disappear, as though their very existence is considered unseemly.