NY Theatrical Premiere
Co-presented by Icarus Films and Congo in Harlem
“Powerfully re-employs Belgian colonial footage… Explores the complexities and ambiguities of the colonial reality… A crucial recovery of long-suppressed history.”—Documentary Magazine
Critic’s Pick! "A film both intimate and political; informative and profound.”—The New York Times
Q&As with Director Alain Kassanda
Alain Kassanda Born in Kinshasa, Alain Kassanda left the DRC for France at the age of 11. He has programmed several film festivals such as Ghett’Out Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre in Boston and BAM in New York. Kassanda has also been the film programmer for the movie-theater Les 39 marches in Sevran, near Paris, for five years and created the festival A hauteur d’enfant, committed to films narrated from children’s perspectives. A spoken word artist, Kassanda is also known as Apkass, one of the founder members of the poetry collective Chant d’encre, largely inspired by role models like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Colette and Justin is his first feature length film, after Trouble Sleep, a mid-length documentary shot in Ibadan (Nigeria) where he lived from 2015 to 2019
Fri Oct 6, 7pm: moderated by Boukary Sawadogo
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Black Studies at CUNY. His research and teaching interests are focused on African cinema, documentary, and Black world experience. He recently authored the book Africans in Harlem: An Untold New York Story.
Sat Oct 7, 1pm: moderated by Bibi Ndala
Outreach Coordinator for Friends of the Congo. She has a Masters of Public Health from NYU, with a concentration in Global Public Health, and in 2019 she launched ELAKA to educate and support expecting mothers in the DR Congo.
Sat Oct 7, 7:30pm: moderated by Milton Allimadi
Ugandan-American author, journalist, professor, and cofounder of Black Star News. He is known for his critical writing on racism in literature, including his 2003 book The Hearts of Darkness and his 2021 Manufacturing Hate.
Sun Oct 8, 1pm: moderated by Natacha Ikoli
filmmaker, artist, and colorist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Kinshasa and raised in Paris, Ikoli is director of the documentary Bana Congo Oyez! (2019), about a member of Congo's National Assembly, and her work as a colorist includes Joonam (2023) and Invisible Beauty (2023).
Born in Kinshasa and living in Paris, filmmaker Alain Kassanda embodies the classic immigrant dual identity: in the Democratic Republic of Congo he is seen as French, while in France he is seen as Congolese. Determined to understand the colonial legacy from which he comes, Kassanda convinces his grandparents—Colette and Justin—to sit for a series of interviews. Together, they watch old news footage, remember a visit from the Belgian king, and recall what life was like as part of the nascent Black bourgeoisie who served the colonial administration. But Colette and Justin is more than a film about family reminiscences. Kassanda uses a wealth of black-and-white archival footage to tell the story, superimposing his own thoughts and his grandparents’ voices over the visuals—in effect, using the colonizers’ images against them.
Kassanda, we learn, has two heroes: Justin and inaugural Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered by secessionists in collusion with Belgium. While making the film, he realizes their lives were intertwined far more deeply than he had realized.
Beginning as one man’s search to understand himself and his roots, Colette and Justin is ultimately an evocative and thoughtful meditation
on the intersection of political and family history, and the multi-generational destructive reach of colonialism.