INTERVIEW: Djo Tunda Wa Munga
by Steve Dollar 
If you've only thought of the Congo in terms of
Hearts of Darkness and the carnage of the Second Congo War, the new film
Viva Riva! is an eye-opener. The first feature from former documentary filmmaker Djo (Joe) Tunda Wa Munga is also the first contemporary Congolese drama to be made by a homegrown director.
Patsha Bay makes his charismatic screen debut as Riva, a cunning thief who's after the heart of a gangster's woman (a riveting, and dangerous redhead named Nora, played by Manie Malone). His insatiable?well, let's call it bravado?leads him to ill-advisedly pursue her while hiding out in the Kinshasa underground after heisting a gasoline truck from his former boss, an Angolan gangster (Hoji Fortuna) who is tearing up the city to find him and get his precious gasoline back. The pace is non-stop, and there's a seductive charge to the vividly choreographed sex and violence, but also plenty of telling details underpinning the comic flourishes with social commentary. As much a mosaic of the hedonistic and pulsing capital city as it is an eccentric crime story, the confidently made
Viva Riva! is a free-spirited film noir splashed with a vibrant African palette.
Munga spoke with
GreenCine Daily this week while promoting the film, which opens June 10th in New York and Los Angeles.
I'd heard good things about it before I saw it, but Viva Riva! really overturned my prejudices about African film being dry and political and not very much fun. One of the challenges of young African filmmakers is to change that image. When you say to people you're going to an African movie, it sounds like homework. We want to challenge that and create new excitement for the audience. The social context of Africa is still important, but maybe we can find a new way to bring things to the audience.
The social critique is right there, but the vehicle that delivers it isn't steered by overt politics. It's fun. Exactly. A vehicle. That's a word I often use. That?s the reason why I took a genre approach. First, it?s easy for the audience. I?m not talking about a Western audience [necessarily]. Just for Africans and Congolese, we have a high level of literacy. Then you want to bring a film that will be easy for the audience to grasp, and a genre film is the easiest to bring complexity to. You have the hero, you have the villain, it's quite easy. But the hero is not the regular hero. He's hero, anti-hero. Did he steal the money? You don't really know. Then you get into this dark part about his character?about his family, his relationship to money, to prostitution. In that sense I was able to put certain issues about Africa and my country on the table.
When did you begin working on the script? My first draft was finished seven years ago. What I had in mind was to make a film about Kinshasa, and I didn't know which angle to start with. At the time, I was also a journalist and I went to the southwest of the country next to the border of Angola, and met some smugglers there. They were going to Angola to get some fuel because they had fuel there. They would smuggle it to Kinshasa, resell it, make money, party like hell, and when they were broke they would go back to Angola. When I interviewed these guys, I thought they were the real Kinshasa people. They had the gasoline shortage at the time, it was really harsh.
What is the film industry like in the Congo? There is no industry. There is no institution. There is no cinema. We are rebuilding from scratch. This is the first production that we have in 25 years, and the first production in Lingala [the Bantu tongue of northwestern Congo].
Are there other people making movies? I have one colleague who makes documentaries. Most Congolese filmmakers are abroad. Some of them are coming back but it's a very complex process.
You employed a highly skilled French crew for the film. My idea was to make a film as a cinephile and for cinephiles. Writing the script the way I did, when I presented it to television they just took it. They didn't take it as a small African film, they took it as a genre film, so they put good money on it. When you have television onboard, it's easier for the other partners to get involved.
Is Kinshasa much as you show it, or is a sexed-up, glamorized version? Kinshasa is one of the safest places in Africa, in the world. The picture I show of Kinshasa?apart from the violence, you have violence in many cities?is very safe. What we see in the news is 2000 kilometers in the east of the country. It's quite a distance. It's a different area.
Would you say that you created a world within a world? Is that underworld genuine? What I'm talking about is just there. The club that you see is a real club. It opened two weeks after the end of the shooting. We shot in many natural places, places that do exist. The only thing that I did, I arranged it a little bit. [The brothel] may have been a little bit too dark. You still have the prostitution as it is, but I put some art elements inside?a vision about the Congo today.
How much was entertainment and how much was realism? I tried to create a balance. What is difficult about the genre film, about the film noir, you need at the same time to bring to a certain tension and sense of reality, and create that distance with the humor, where people still say this is like a feature film. It was difficult to find, to create something that will find its own tone.
Maybe because of the French connection, I was thinking about the rich tradition of 1950s French caper movies. The ensemble cast and comic flourishes also seemed, given a cultural stretch, akin to the eccentricities of Elmore Leonard's crime novels. Were there films that inspired you here? I didn't have a specific film in mind. You can feel certain directors I admire, like Sergio Leone, and the Chinese/Hong Kong movies of the '80s. The project I really worked on in terms of concept was
Stray Dog, from Akira Kurosawa, 1949. It was a very interesting concept with this detective who loses his gun, or somebody stole his gun, you're not really sure. He starts chasing the person and discovers Tokyo after the Second World War. That documentary base mingled with the fiction, I found it really great. And for Kinshasa, I thought this is what we should do. To bring the fiction and documentary together and have a good story.
I suspect you created a lot of excitement. There's a lot of joy in this production, a lot of fun. The Congolese and the Westerners mingled really well, and we had a lot of support from the population.
It was funny to me, how the local gang boss lives in a big house but none of his cars will run because he has no gasoline. It undercuts his stature a little bit. No matter how badass they act, none of the characters are on top of the situation. Except for Riva, who challenges everybody. Because he is free in his mind. The important thing about creating these characters is they have a sense of different interaction with the environment. Everybody, including the priest, can suddenly be affected by the gasoline [crisis]. We are all human, we are all in the same environment, and we all need to find survival mode.
Casting a film like this, which has so much invested in the unique personality of a place, must have been a fascinating process. I had a casting director and she went to meet people in Kinshasa. Her name is Kris de Bellair. It was her first trip to Africa. She works on
Michael Haneke's movies. You can imagine what type of mentality she gave me! It was quite a contrast. I wanted someone neutral. She went into the city to bring in material. None of the characters of the people she brought were the stars of Kinshasa.
Manie Malone, the stunning actress who plays Nora, where did you find her? In Paris. Nora is someone really unique. We didn't find that person in Kinshasa. She had that wild and fantastic look of a femme fatale that I thought was essential for the film. She came and she learned Lingala and she worked really hard. She did it.
So you're not working with a real experienced cast. What challenge did that pose? You prepare more. It's not having a routine, but you know where you want to bring the people. When you do preparation, the people get comfortable, you get comfortable, and sometimes you get that magic that you need for the scene.
Viva Riva! comes out in NYC and Los Angeles on June 10. For more info, visit the official website. 
Posted by ahillis at June 3, 2011 1:17 PM
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