The concept for this movie started when a buddy was planning an exhibition that includes Congolese paintings. She was contemplating together with the documentary “Beneath the Black Masks” (1958), by the Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts, however was not sure how you can current the piece, which incorporates voice-over and pictures that stereotype and exoticize Congolese tradition. How might we adequately contextualize a piece by a filmmaker from Belgium created within the closing years of that nation’s decades-long, brutal colonial occupation of what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Even when the unique movie had been introduced with commentary, such critique sometimes seems offscreen, solely out there to those that select to or are in a position to search it out. I urged that we as an alternative create a brand new movie that may reframe the unique imagery.
I started by choosing pictures from “Beneath the Black Masks” that gave me the sensation that the masks confronted me instantly, permitting them to momentarily escape Haesaerts’ body. What would these pictures have stated if they’d a voice? We determined to switch the narration with excerpts from Aimé Césaire’s seminal work “Discourse on Colonialism,” which argued that colonization dehumanizes the colonizer and was printed lower than a decade earlier than the unique movie was made. It was a textual content I had carried near my coronary heart for a few years.
We translated Césaire’s textual content into Lingala, a language spoken in Congo, and the brand new voice-over was carried out by Maravilha Munto, a younger slam poet who spontaneously related with the phrases written three generations earlier. The result’s this quick documentary, which I check with as “the movie that Haesaerts might have made.”