Benda Bilili!



Rising From the Streets, a Band and Spirits

The joy is palpable when Staff Benda Bilili plays the World Music Festival in Oslo. A heart-racing energy pumps the musicians and transports the audience. The band celebrates by sipping wine with the Argentine ambassador, smoking substances in hotel rooms and reflecting on an improbably successful European tour.
The back story of these moments is uplift and then some: the core band members are middle-aged and disabled by polio, performing from wheelchairs and on crutches. Other players are teenagers of the street. All have known nights sleeping on cardboard in the urban misery of Kinshasa, Congo.

The documentary “Benda Bilili!,” in French and Lingala, captures five years in the lives of this intergenerational street band, five years in which the buskers move from practicing at the decaying Kinshasa zoo to performing for enraptured crowds on the strength of their album, “Très Très Fort,” French for “Very Very Strong” — which they are.


The film was written and directed by Renaud Barret and Florent De la Tullaye, who burrowed into the lives of these men and boys with intimacy and, astonishing under the circumstances, humor. Their years of following the band make us feel that we know these musicians, who use tires as bathtubs in public, hand-pedal their tricycles on potted roads and fashion instruments from tin cans and twine. But we can’t know them, not really. Their grass roots are concrete and dirt; their bootstraps are invisible.

Yet the members of Staff Benda Bilili (the name means “look beyond appearances”) embrace their circumstances, valuing the dispossessed as they seek another destiny; their easygoing comradeship belies their fierce pride in their work and perseverance. They are generous to some beggars while scoffing at others for behaving like simple villagers.

The 2009 concerts that end the film are more than a climactic pleasure: even these scenes are character-driven, with the gentle leader determined to make the most of the opportunity; the stoic, often inscrutable young soloist going all Jimi Hendrix on the crowd; and the grinning vocalist and choreographer dancing in his wheelchair before leaping to the floor, hands and nubs of his legs in rhythm.

If at times the audience feels taken on a ride, on a documentary “Rocky” out of sub-Saharan Africa, well, there is a thrill in an underdog’s success. But “Benda Bilili!” is brutally real, a document of willpower that shows not only the magic of transcendence — which may be fleeting — but also the transformation of aspiring to it, every struggling step of the way.

Written and directed by Renaud Barret and Florent De la Tullaye; directors of photography, Mr. Barret and Mr. De la Tullaye; edited by Jean-Christophe Hym; produced by Yves Chanvillard and Nadim Cheikhrouha; released by National Geographic Entertainment. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In French and Lingala, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.


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