Benda Bilili!

Staff Benda Bilili

This evening I went to the Brixton Ritzy cinema to see a preview of a new film Benda Bilili, with a question and answer session afterwards with the directors. I had never heard of the film but it was about a subject close to my heart, African music.

The film is a documentary which follows the rags-to-riches tale of the band Staff Benda Bilili who despite being mostly crippled by polio and living on the streets of war ravaged Kinshasa, have been catapulted into world music superstardom.

Whilst that is the basic story, there are a lot of other elements the film brings up such as attitudes to the disabled, the human impact of the vicious war in Congo, and above all the resilience of people and how, when it’s all you have, hope can be enough to live on.

I really enjoyed the film. There are some very distressing parts to it, but the overall mood is upbeat and positive. After the film finished there was applause as the Belgian directors came into the auditorium.

There was then about half an hour of questions put to the directors, many of which were about the individuals in the band and how fame had affected them. Another popular subject for the questions was about the experience of filming in that environment. The directors said that locals are very suspicious of Westerners with cameras, thinking that all anyone wants to do is to show how terrible everything is in their country. The directors had a battle against some hostility to try and convince locals that they were essentially trying to tell a positive story, albeit against a negative backdrop. The band are revered in Kinshasa and are seen as cultural ambassadors, many people having lost all faith in politics.

So if you get a chance to see it in a cinema or on DVD I would recommend it, it certainly makes you think and gives you an insight into how humans can experience such terrible deprivation and suffering but somehow transcend and transform their own and others’ lives through music and hope.