Who: Lebert Sandy Bethune, Herb Boyd, Milton Allimadi, Lubangi Muniania, more
What: Thirteenth annual Congo in Harlem festival
Where: Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Lenox Ave. / Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th and 128th Sts.
When: Saturday, October 23, and Sunday, October 24, $12 (virtual screenings free)
Why: The Maysles Documentary Center’s thirteenth annual Congo in Harlem festival, part of Congo Week, concludes its hybrid presentation this weekend with a trio of in-person screenings, two of which are followed by live discussions. On October 23 at 7:30, Maysles will show Bill Stephens’s raw, recently rediscovered, untranslated, and unfinished 1971 film, Congo Oyé, made in collaboration with Chris Marker, Paul and Carole Roussopoulas, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, consisting of forty-five minutes of remarkable footage of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s visit to Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. At the same time, the Harlem-based theater will screen Lebert Bethune and John Taylor’s 1966 doc, Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, with Bethune, scholar and activist Herb Boyd, and journalist Milton Allimadi on hand to talk about the film, which was shot in Paris shortly before the controversial leader’s assassination.
Bill Stephens’s recently rediscovered Congo Oyé, is part of Maysles Documentary Center’s Congo in Harlem festival
On October 24 at 4:00, Congolese art educator Lubangi Muniania will moderate a discussion after a screening of Mark Kidel’s 1989 film, New York: Secret African City, in which scholar Robert Farris Thompson, who has been writing and teaching about African art and culture since 1958, shares his iconographic studies of the diaspora in New York, beginning with a trip across the Brooklyn Bridge in which Thompson explains, “We’re undergoing a ritual moment because we’re leaving Wall Street, we’re leaving Madison Avenue, we’re leaving white New York, and we’re entering one of the blackest of the cultural segments of New York.” Tickets to the events are $12 each. In addition, free virtual screenings continue through October 24 of Jihan El-Tahri’s L’Afrique en Morceaux (Africa in Pieces), Douglas Ntimasiemi and Raffi Aghekian’s Kinshasa Mboka Té (Kinshasa Wicked Land), Mathieu Roy’s Les Creuseurs (The Diggers), Kidel’s Pygmies in Paris, Sammy Baloji and David Bernatchez’s Rumba Rules: New Genealogies, Moimi Wezam’s Zero, and the above-mentioned works as well as more than a dozen shorts.