Félicité: Paths of Possibility

Alain Gomis's fourth feature film won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2017. This much-deserved award consecrated a filmmaker who already won the FESPACO Golden Stallion Award in 2013. Félicité also went on to win the Golden Stallion at the 2017 FESPACO, with Gomis becoming the second only director to win this award twice.

It could have been a valiant tale of maternal determination. After receiving a phone call, Félicité (played by the imposing Véro Tshanda Beya), a singer in a bar by night, finds her son Samo (Gaetan Claudia) lying bloody and seriously wounded in a hospital bed. She sets out on a mission to get together the money for the operation, deploying an incredible energy in the heaving chaos of a disinherited Kinshasa. It would have been easy enough to identify with this classic plot of a woman who takes destiny into her own hands, but the film does not stop there.

Félicité is more of a lioness than imaginable, but an event pulls the rug from under her feet. Will she manage to recover? What will it take? It is here that Alain Gomis's film ascends to a completely other dimension, where Félicité escapes the despair and self-hatred shared by victims and perpetrators alike. She has to hit rock bottom to be able to come back to life. This will only be possible by accepting love, and by considering herself worthy of it. Reaching this point is no mean feat in a city where everything conspires to crush people. In a strange blueish light, an amateur symphonic orchestra plays Arvo Pärt¹. Thus foregrounded and recurrently repeated, the orchestra or choir underscore the drama that fills daily life. Nothing can be expected of the structures in place, not even the slightest support. On the contrary, there are those ready to rip you off around every corner. Only "Article 15" works, the famous making-do, a makeshift solution.

Félicité adeptly turns the police's corruption or the fear and contempt of the rich to her advantage, albeit taking terrible risks. Making demands would get her nowhere; it is nerve and active resistance that are required. The path to serenity is long, especially when jealousy threatens. This doesn't exclude uniting to fight: Tabu (the forceful Papi Mpaka), Félicité's boyfriend, encourages Samo's anger and courage. It is collectively, as a people and not as victims, that the young Congolese today are challenging the powers that be and pushing back the boundaries. It takes unwavering determination, which can only come from a daily renewal.

Where will Félicité find the strength to coax her son back to life? She will have to cross the night waters, cross the invisible boundary of renunciation, resuscitate from limbo, remove "the thorns from her heart," embrace the uncertain and believe in the weight of the ephemeral, laugh at the makeshift, sing again, encounter a mythological animal, and draw life force from the music of the Kasaï Allstars, they who blend traditional sources and electro-trance.

Infused with music, this film draws on different registers to create a poetics—that of the Blues—the collective chant of a culture of resistance rooted in the real. The camera weaves through the urban chaos and espouses its rhythm. It moves closely with the bodies, as together they vibrate in unison. It accompanies their perspiration, their silences, magnifying the beauty of those who do not take off in flight.

Alain Gomis thus pays an intense and moving homage to those who stop considering themselves victims and face up to their daily life in an effort to reconcile themselves with themselves. Félicité is inhabited by the dignity of those who do not stop at the ugliness of the world, but who, on the contrary, turn it into the basis of the possible. No translation is needed to understand what Félicité finally sings acapella, sweeping her audience along with her. Surely she tells us that, today, in Africa, the scandal of the world is...