Debuts
On Thursday, a gala unfurled on the Croisette with a wildly different tone to the glittering spectacle of the Robin Hood screening which opened the the Cannes Film Festival. Descending into the Palais Stephanie hotel's Theatre Croisette - minus menacing-looking minders - were 10 musicians from Kinshasa and two French filmmakers who, until six years ago, were an advertising agency director and a photojournalist.
Welcome to the premiere of Benda Bilili!, which launched this year's Directors' Fortnight. Set up in 1969 as an alternative to the more conventional 'official competition', the Fortnight is known for showcasing more experimental work. But even by the event's standards, Benda Bilili! is unconventional as a curtain-raiser, a documentary about a Congolese band that marks the first feature-length film from a pair of directors.
'I was looking for an African movie [to begin the Fortnight] but not one about ancestral traditions,' says Frederic Boyer, the Fortnight's artistic director, in his office at the Malmaison building, off the Croisette. 'Normally, African movies made with French subvention are quite traditional. But Benda Bilili! is very urban, very violent and a very rough and tough film.'
The title stems from Staff Benda Bilili, a musical group from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo; it means 'beyond appearances' in the country's Lingala language, a reference to the fact that five of the core members are paraplegics.
The film began in 2004, when Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye travelled to Kinshasa and came to know the band. An amalgamation of footage filmed from 2004 (when the band were struggling) to 2009 (when they toured Scandinavia after their records cultivated European followers), Benda Bilili! is a deft chronicle of kindred souls trying to attain their artistic ambitions - or, to quote singer Coco Yakala, 'to become the most famous disabled men in all of Africa'.
What makes Benda Bilili! even more unusual, however, is how it fits into this year's Fortnight line-up, which includes Stephen Kijak's Rolling Stones documentary Stones in Exile, Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym, and Cleveland versus Wall Street, Jean-Stephane Bron's staging of a fake trial featuring the real-life protagonists in attempts by Cleveland lawyers to sue 21 banks over real-estate foreclosures.
Such a programme could be seen as a statement of intent for Boyer, who began his tenure last summer. Apart from documentaries, the Fortnight also hosts work from 11 debutant filmmakers and a string of sophomore efforts. There was a marked difference here than in previous years, when the work of master auteurs began the showcase (Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna in 2008, Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro last year).
Boyer says it's important for the Fortnight to be 'a place of discoveries', just like how it showed the early works of budding filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Indeed, the Fortnight has become a brand for cinephiles, even eclipsing the standing of the Critics' Week parallel section, which began in 1961.
Among the films, Boyer singled out Gustavo Hernandez's The Silent House, a horror film about a strange house filmed in one continuous, 78-minute shot, and Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte, a mesmerising film about Italian rural life in Calabria.
'It's just incredible - it's like a documentary - and I would be more impressed by Michelangelo than by Mick Jagger' in Stones in Exile, about the making of the album Exile On Main Street, he says. 'I loved [the Stones'] film but Michelangelo, he's like a big master for me.'
Lately the Fortnight has proved very successful in mining future talents: the Israeli film Ajami, about life in an Arab-dominated neighbourhood in Jaffa, debuted at last year's showcase before making its way into the public consciousness through its best foreign-language film nomination at the Oscars.
What Boyer looks for are fresh perspectives.
'I was not selling the films for the Camera d'Or [the Cannes title for first-time filmmakers]. The discovery is not just a first film, but directors not under the influence. A lot of first films were under the influence of Scorsese, [John] Cassavetes or David Lynch, there were so many. I want to have films, even when some are small, which are totally personal. The most important person is to make it unique ... even if it's bizarre.'
