In 2007, I received an offer from the United Nations Mission
to the Democratic Republic in the Congo (MONUC) to become Chief of their Video
Unit. I immediately accepted, and found a very talented international staff of
10, equipped with the latest Sony HD cameras and several state-of-art editing
suites. The job was a dream come true, and I found the Congo a fascinating and
very complex subject.
Over the next 5 years, we produced over 200 weekly video
magazines with a Congolese cast shown on all major domestic television
networks, with Congolese television
journalist Horeb Bulambo as our main attraction. It seems only natural now that we should be
working together again with members of the MONUC Video Unit team, with Horeb as
the director of CONGO: A MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
One of the buzzwords in developmental planning circles in
the past decade has been capacity
building; this means passing on technological skills to developing
countries so they can become self-reliant and independent. In the world of communications media, as
noted previously, the cost of using analog film, audio and television
technology has been a major stumbling block.
Now, thanks to digital technology, this stumbling block has disappeared
– a development I witnessed first hand in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
where I saw the phenomenon of Radio Okapi, which is easily the most successful
example of developmental communications capacity building in the world.
The result of a joint effort by the United Nations and the
Swiss foundation Fondation Hirondelle, Radio
Okapi was created in 2002 to provide a reliable source of national information
in a country devastated by war. Today, with a staff of C. 200 reporting from around
the DRC, Radio Okapi reaches over 50% of the population, and is the most
popular and trusted radio station in the country; personally, I would have
liked to emulate the Okapi capacity building model in digital video production,
but this activity lay outside our mission mandate, and probably would have been
blocked by our partners in the Congolese government, who already had periodic
conflicts with Radio Okapi reporting on sensitive issues. Freedom of expression
comes at a price in the DRC; three different Radio Okapi journalists have been
murdered under very suspicious circumstances.
During my five years as Chief of the Video
Unit, I was blessed with a superb team, and the star performers are my current
partners – Director Horeb Bulambo, Cinematographer Albert Liesegang, Cinematographer/Editor Alan Brain and Editor/Graphic
Designer Meriton Ahmeti. Together, we made a decision to look for good stories
and to produce them in our own cinema verite style; we hated standard UN “ Voice of God” narration, and wanted to let our subjects tell their
own stories whenever possible.
While we come from different backgrounds, the
five of us share a dedication to the art and craft of cinema, and we are
forever seeking to push the creative envelope to find new horizons to explore.
Unfortunately, with its obsession with the printed word, the UN has never been
able to understand visual media, with sadly predictable results.
Indeed, since 1976, I have had something of a
love-hate relationship with the organization, and have left several times after
creative disputes, vowing to never return. In 2000, for example, fed up with
what I considered a cover up of massive Indonesian human rights violations in
Timor Leste, I left UNTAET to make my own independent documentary feature about
East Timor. The result, produced on a shoestring budget, EAST TIMOR: BETRAYAL
AND RESURRECTION, was technically rough, but it won the prestigious UN
Correspondents’ Association’s Ricardo Ortega Award for Excellence in Electronic
Journalism in 2004. This film also was extremely popular with the East
Timorese, who are now producing a Portuguese version for distribution to the
Lusaphonic countries of the world. ( For this film, please see: https://youtu.be/j_s46-5R4OE )
In Congo, my dream has been to pick up where
that documentary left off, and to produce a feature documentary showing both the
existential challenges confronting UN Peacekeepers in the field, and the hopes
and dreams of the people of the host nation from their perspective. CONGO:A
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE? is the realization of that dream.
Our Sample Demo on Human Rights, which is Part 4 in CONGO: THE AFRICAN SPRING offers a good illustration of our
cinematic style and approach. While we are telling the story of the late Fernando
Castanon on one level, we have several narrative threads unfolding
simultaneously to give a feeling of the unending wave of human rights
violations that required investigation – with most of these cases never being brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
( For the link to our Human Rights Sample
Demo, please click here: https://vimeo.com/154673345 (password: Dzigavertov )
Our talented Director Horeb Bulambo, now on
location in Congo, will deliver a personal
and poetic introduction to each chapter
from Congo. Our editor Meriton Ahmeti
is a highly skilled graphic designer with a full arsenal of fonts and animated
techniques, as well as a talented composer. Along with using original Congolese
music, Meriton will be creating a score for CONGO: A MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
We are looking forward to producing a feature
documentary that will be aesthetically bold, dynamic and as emotionally
gripping and powerful as Congo
itself. We were there four years longer than
Josef Conrad, so we have a creative obligation to provide a contemporary update
on his century-old vision.
For The Samba Project, LLC demo reel, please click on this link:
Labels: # CONGO; A MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?, # Horeb Bulembo, #Congo, #MONUSCO, #Ted Folke, #UN Peacekeeping
