Congolese director Dieudo Hamadi sees his selection on the 2025 Cannes Film Festival jury as “recognition for a career” spent chronicling the traumas of his native Democratic Republic of Congo.
Across his 15-year career, Hamadi has won acclaim for his films grappling with both the DRC’s decades of conflicts and the corruption, which together form an inescapable part of Congolese daily life.
Yet the man from Kisangani — scene of a momentous clash in 2000 during the devastating Second Congo War, when he was just a teenager — said he never imagined himself making films when he was younger, let alone ascending to cinema’s elite.
“In my town, Kisangani, we didn’t grow up with the idea of becoming filmmakers. It’s not a dream in our culture,” the 41-year-old director told AFP in the DRC’s capital Kinshasa.
“We knew that films existed but becoming a film professional was not an idea we had,” said Hamadi.
Home to more than 100 million people, the DRC’s filmmaking industry is yet to take off, a legacy of both its troubled modern history and a lack of funds.
Up until it gained independence from Belgium in 1960, the colonists forbade their Congolese subjects from watching films produced outside Belgium, for fear foreign features would foster subversion.
After freedom from Belgian rule, decades of political and military conflicts greatly hampered the emergence of a Congolese national cinema.
So while Hamadi was wrapping up six months of shooting, sheltered from the rainy downpour by the grand hangar of the French institute in Kinshasa, it was for a series for French channel Canal+ “99 percent financed from abroad”, he said.
Yet the director, gesticulating to his some 20-strong team of actors and technicians — a large-scale production by Kinshasa standards — was proud of the fact that his artistic and production team was “100 percent Congolese”.
‘Please my father’
With a title meaning “spirit” in Lingala, one of the DRC’s national languages, “Milimo” signposts the path taken by the filmmaker who originally went to study medicine “to please my father”, as Hamadi put it, visibly amused at the thought.
It was his father who led him to discover his passion for cinema by gifting him a computer, on which the young Hamadi would try his hand at editing videos.
“I got the taste for storytelling with images,” he said, and above all for “relating my environment, my day-to-day”.
So Hamadi, today the author of five full-length features, turned to making documentaries.
From his earliest films, the director has focused on the darkest corners of life in the DRC, which, while blessed with vast natural resources, ranks among the world’s poorest countries.
“Atalaku” (“Town Criers”, 2013) follows a pastor who sells his services to the highest-bidding politician while his congregation heads to the polls.
“National Diploma” (2014) reveals students being denied the chance to sit their exams for failing to bribe their teachers. “Mama Colonel” (2017) centres on a policewoman tasked with tackling paedophilia.
Hamadi’s heroes are all trapped in a deeply unequal society, forced to confront corrupt officials and unpunished abuses by the powerful.
Telling traumatic stories
Cannes consecration finally came in 2020 with “En route pour le milliard” (“Downstream to Kinshasa”), selected for that year’s edition of the festival.
At the documentary’s heart lies a battle during the Second Congo War, known as “Africa’s World War” for the millions killed from violence, disease and starvation across its five years from 1998 to 2003, which tore apart his Kisangani hometown.
For six days between June 5 and June 10, 2000 the eastern mining hub was riven by pitched battles between the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, just two of the more than half-dozen African nations drawn into the conflict.
Hamadi films the odyssey of a victims’ association travelling from Kisangani to Kinshasa, sailing down the River Congo across a distance of around 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles), to demand reparations for their sufferings.
“For the people of my generation it was a trauma which has not wholly gone away today. As a filmmaker, I wanted to tell the story of these traumas,” he said.
Though Hamadi was unable to travel to Cannes in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Congolese director will be on the nine-member jury for the festival’s 78th edition, which begins on May 13.
