‘Rising Up At Night’: Visions du Reel Review

Dir/scr: Nelson Makengo. Democratic Republic of the Congo/Belgium/Germany/Burkina Faso/Qatar. 2024. 95 mins

Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is afflicted by dual disasters. Flooding has submerged numerous neighbourhoods adjacent to the Congo River. And, with plans to build Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant making headlines but not progress, many of the city’s 17 million inhabitants find themselves without electricity. Darkness in this fervently Christian country brings with it a symbolic resonance, as well as more practical concerns – something that Congolese visual artist and filmmaker Nelson Makengo explores vividly and evocatively in this powerful impressionistic collage of lives forced into uncertainty.

A formally bold approach that captures the uneasy sense of unseen dangers

Makengo’s feature debut, Rising Up At Night, which premiered in Berlin’s Panorama before winning the Special Jury Prize in Visions du Reel’s International Competition, can be viewed as a companion piece to his 2019 IDFA-winning short Up At Night. Both films explore nocturnal Kinshasa plagued by power loss and the kind of criminal activities that thrive in the shadows. The country that Joseph Conrad described as the ’Heart Of Darkness’ is shot almost entirely at night – a decision that brings an abstract quality, with erratic battery-powered lights in synthetic colours and snippets of disembodied voices. It’s a formally bold approach that captures the uneasy sense of unseen dangers, but the visual murkiness can make it a little tricky to work out which characters we are following, interrupting the film’s natural through line.

One character, however, does make his presence felt early on. Kudi unpacks batteries to power a loudhailer then, from the candlelit gloom of his home, sends a message out into the night to his fellow residents in the neighbourhood of Kinsenso. He calls on them to come together for a meeting at which they can work to solve the problem of stolen cables and the lack of electricity.

The neighbours agree that something needs to be done: one woman suffered multiple injuries after falling into a two metre-deep hole in the inky darkness of the unlit streets, another complains that she can’t see if there are worms in the food she gives her children. And then there is the rising risk of rape and assault. There is less of a clear consensus on who should take responsibility for any money raised, but it is decided that the community’s older matriarchs – the Mamas – will handle the funds.

They are right to be cautious: the city’s state of crisis has brought out the worst in some of its residents, with everything from violent crime to the selling of watered-down petrol on the rise. Without the distraction of television and music, it is perhaps to be expected that some of the youth will go off the rails. Other young men lift weights in a makeshift outdoor gymnasium, biding their time until a semblance of normality returns.

Makengo makes evocative use of rhythms, both in a score that veers between exultant and melodic harp and flutes, and deconstructed, tortured drums and voices, and in the editing. Religious worship is a recurring motif. The film opens with an audio-only recording of a prayer meeting, in which the preacher draws a clear parallel between electricity and Christian enlightenment: “a home without electricity is an unhappy home…clap for Jesus Christ”. With each return visit to a place of worship, the dogma becomes more extreme (“Darkness is the Devil”) and the desperation rises. The score accompanying these scenes becomes increasingly frenzied, as if consumed by a religious fervour to match that of the believers.

Perhaps the most extraordinary scene comes when a young man, made homeless by the floods, revisits the family home where his mother and younger siblings still live, waist-deep in water. They show him a bucket with catfish caught in their living room, and explain the use of bricks, to weigh down some pieces of furniture so they don’t float away, and to build up others – the bed for example – so that they are precariously clear of the swirling brown overflow.

When the camera finally emerges into the daylight, at around 70 minutes into the running time, it reveals a watery dawn and a yellowish dusk that looks as though it has been stained by the tidelines of the flood. Even so, by the end of the film there is sense that the clouds are finally parting, and that the light may yet return.