Democratic Republic of the Congo, France and Belgium / 2022 / 89mins / Documentary / Lingala and French

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 maternal 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. (He generally avoids footage of the horrors, focusing instead on daily life.) Kassanda, we learn, has two heroes: Justin and inaugural Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered by secessionists in collusion with Belgium. In the course of making Colette and Justin, he realizes their lives were intertwined far more deeply than he knew.

Alain Kassanda

Born in Kinshasa, Alain Kassanda left the DRC for France at the age of 11. He has participated in 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. As 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 & 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.
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