Congolese Filmmaker Wins Venice Final Cut for 'Madi Makambu' — SkimNews
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- Machérie Ekwa Bahango won Final Cut's La Biennale di Venezia Prize at the Venice Film Festival for her upcoming film 'Madi Makambu,' which she describes as centering two lovers, Madi and Djino, whose lives shift after Madi gives birth to a child Djino didn't father following a denied pregnancy
- Ekwa Bahango is a self-taught filmmaker whose first feature 'Maki'la' (about children living on the streets) premiered at Berlinale; she says film school 'would have certainly taken away' the freedom and vulnerability her cinema requires
- Her short 'Sema' led her to work with women survivors of rape and violence in eastern Congo, which she credits with crystallizing her focus on 'resilient and strong women' as protagonists
- Jurors Tareq Al-Ibrahim, Mariette Rissenbeek and Tamara Tatishvili said 'Madi Makambu' invites audiences to follow a 'genuine and electrifying young female protagonist, trying to navigate the violence and social injustice that is her unchosen reality'
- Ekwa Bahango identifies the primary local challenge as financial, saying many people don't take filmmaking seriously and therefore don't invest in it — and pushes back against the West's expectation of 'one general model of African cinema' across 54+ countries
- 'Madi Makambu' is produced by CL1 D'oeil Studio and co-produced by Boucan Films
Why it matters: The prize puts a self-taught Congolese director on a major European festival stage at a moment when she's explicitly arguing that Western audiences still frame African cinema monolithically; her Final Cut award is one of the rare post-production grants that can bridge the financing gap she flags as the core obstacle for filmmakers working in the DRC.
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