‘Rumba Rules, New Genealogies - Sammy Baloji, David Nadeau-Bernatchez’

Permeating the daily life of one of the great orchestras of the current generation, Rumba Rules proposes an incursion into the mysteries of a monumental African music. An essay on the meaning of self and rootedness, the film culminates in a kind of urban polyphony. Ya Mayi, Lumumba, Xéna La Guerrière, Pitchou Travolta, Alfred Solo, Soleil Patron and many  others: nearly thirty artists feed the creative life of the Brigade Sarbati Orchestra. By entering the group and the city of Kinshasa, the film gets into the rumba as if it were penetrating a rootstock. Through studio work, rehearsals and concerts, different portraits offer a foray into the dynamics and stories of this highly acclaimed Congolese music. From local roots to the patrons from the diaspora, the voices of Rumba Rules polyphony are past and present.

David N. Bernatchez is a Quebec filmmaker and producer. As an anthropologist, he has investigated the Congolese music scene. He divides his time between filmmaking, academic research and musical performance. Whether they focus on music (Rumba in fragments, 2018), sport (Temps temps, 2009) or more widely, on history and memory (Ludovica, 2018,  Joseph Samuel Jacques Julien, 2015), Bernatchez's films constantly question social and narrative structures. His images, performances and lectures had been presented in various contexts and countries. 

Sammy Baloji is a visual artist and photographer. As a visual artist, Baloji juxtaposes photographic realities, combining past and present, the real and the ideal, to illicit glaring cultural and historical tensions. He explores architecture and the human body as traces of social history, sites of memory, and witnesses to operations of power. Selected filmography: Kasala: The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error (2020), Tales of the Copper Crosses Garden: Episode 1 (2018), The Tower (2017), Pungulume (2016), Bare-faced (2011), Mémoire (2007) 

Kiripi Katembo was a Congolese photographer and filmmaker: his camera was physical and his gaze penetrating. He was a unifier in his country, and very attached to Kinshasa, where he lived until his death in 2015. Organized by the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Congo Kitoko (1926-2015)  is the last exhibition in which he participated during his lifetime.