Up at Night

Nelson Makengo
2019-10-09

Homemade battery packs and snaking power cables connect citizens of Kinshasa resisting darkness.
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21 min

Although Nuit debout opens with a woman’s account deploring the shortage of electricity in Kinshasa, the direct nature of the invective is put at a distance by the way it is treated: the image that should accompany the voice is first absent, then tripled. The film seems to be the result of a mischievous prism that sometimes multiplies the image, sometimes associates it with others. By combining colourful shots bordering on the abstract with ambient sounds, the filmmaker proposes a personal variation on a documentary tradition: that of the urban symphony. The visual stream is as precarious as the electric current and it happens that darkness invites itself onto the screen without warning. The images echo each other or are sometimes attuned to create veritable triptychs.