The first feature film made in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 25 years, and the very first made in Lingala, Viva Riva! is a powerful, violent portrait of the Kinshasa underworld of crime and avarice. The protagonist, Riva (Patsha Bay), acquires a stash of petrol that has been smuggled into the Congo, where petrol is in short supply — so he stands to make an awful lot of money out of it.
Various gangsters are after Riva and the petrol, too, but Riva is more concerned with having a good time while he waits for the price of petrol to go yet higher. Taking cash advances from a dealer, and co-opting an old friend into driving him around the sprawling city he left decades ago, Riva wants to drink and seduce women, even as the gangsters and corrupt elements in the national army close in on him.
Viva Riva! is riven with violence and clouded by a sense of despair. It is in no way a pretty picture of this particular society. I had met Viva Riva! director Djo Tunda wa Munga at the Durban International Film Festival in July, where he was on a panel I chaired. Then, I hadn’t yet seen his film, hence my first comment to him.
You seem a charming, sensitive and thoughtful person, and yet your film is so violent and dark.
Well, I want to reflect my times and my society. I try to be a nice person [laughs] and a good citizen, but when it comes to art we have a responsibility to be as honest as possible.
There is a boy who keeps popping up in the film, and who seems to represent some gesture towards the future, but the ending of the movie leaves him in an ambivalent position.
That’s where we are. We don’t know what is to come. With Riva, I wanted to describe a character who’s like how I see the people of Kinshasa. When there is so much misery, everyÂone’s in survival mode — you’re hunted. At this level of desperation you just do what you have to do to survive. We live in troubled times.
How did you get into filmmaking?
It was an evolution from my art work. I come from a family of artists, or some of them could have been artists. I was drawing from an early age. I was a fine-art student, I was making images but I wasn’t writing. Then I developed an interest in cinema and went to film school in
Belgium.
Were there particular films or filmmakers who inspired you?
There wasn’t much to look at in my day. Sembène Ousmane was definitely my reference, because his character was strong, he was politically alive, and I liked his films. I still like them. In the early 1990s, the rest of African cinema was still coming up.
Do you feel a tension between trying to tell African stories, possibly in an African way, and the dominance of American styles and narratives that can be more commercially viable?
In terms of models, it can be hard to hold the line between an African identity and the American style. The line is shifting all the time. But what people recognise now, I think, is that you can be true to your African identity and still make your films popular. In genre films, the code of the story has always been quoting other films, other stories. I think it’s more about point of view, how you want to see life and reality, how you want to perform that. That’s the issue.
South Africa has been free for 17 years. In the Congo, we have 50 years of independence, of problems, mistakes and identity crises. Those 50 years, you feel them in the film. You can feel that there are places where we can say “This is our problem” and we can look at it without make-up. Film is an ambiguous medium — you need to have all these layers. You need to jump into a trouble zone, and when you’re there you can see and you can recreate it.
The great American directors of the 1930s and the 1940s were not American — they were European. They had run away from the war and so on. These guys made some of the most wonderful films. They were constrained to work in certain types of genre, film noir and westerns, but within these genres they managed to talk about really complex issues. That’s how I look at filmmaking, because I have similar problems as a director.
We, African directors of my generation, are at this very delicate moment because we want to see ourselves on the screen, okay, but we also want to be popular, we want to be cool. So I can understand that there is a tendency to make films on American models. The question is: Where am I in the film?
There’s a big rush to be a filmmaker nowadays, to have your film up on the screen. But in the old days people had to write films for others first, for years, or had to be producers. By doing that you learn and you see. It gives you time to find out what you want to do and to develop your skills. I didn’t rush into being a director. I worked for other directors and I could learn. It gave me time to write and to think and to develop my craft.
Have you shown Viva Riva! in the Congo?
We’ve had some test screenings. It will be released there soon. The reaction was very good. I was expecting more tension. It’s the first film in Lingala, ever, and I didn’t know what people were expecting — maybe they were expecting Mary Poppins [laughs] and then the film is really dark, you know. But people respected that, and they liked that, because there was a sense of “This is our reality” and I think that’s a relief for people.
After 50 years of independence, there’s no fooling around anymore. There’s nothing to hide.
Viva Riva! has limited screenings at the Bioscope in Jo’burg this week and next; it opens on general release on October 7