African Duo Makes History in Cannes With Un Certain Regard Premieres ‘Congo Boy,’ ‘Ben’Imana’

African cinema will make history at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with filmmakers from two of the continent’s nascent screen industries cracking the official selection of the prestigious French fest for the very first time.

Both Rwandan debutante Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, with her post-genocide drama “Ben’Imana,” and Central African filmmaker Rafiki Fariala, with his coming-of-age drama “Congo Boy,” will fly the flags of their respective nations over the Croisette when their films premiere in Un Certain Regard.

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Fariala, who broke ground in 2022 when his documentary “We, Students!” became the first feature from the Central African Republic to play at the Berlinale, arrives in Cannes with a deeply autobiographical story of a young Congolese refugee pursuing his dream of becoming a singer in a country torn apart by civil war.

Trained at a workshop run by the Paris-based Ateliers Varan in the Central African capital, Bangui, Fariala conceived “Congo Boy” by mining his own journey as a self-taught musician whose family fled Congo when he was a boy. 

Though his adopted country has been riven by its own conflict for more than a decade, Fariala tells Variety there was no question of where he would film his debut. “It was important for me to shoot in Bangui,” he says.

Many of the film’s crew members were culled from the ranks of CinéBangui, a training program backed by Lyon’s CinéFabrique film school. The cast is entirely comprised of non-professional actors, with lead Bradley Fiomona plucked from a street casting call by French casting director Aline Dalbis (“Souleymane’s Story”). Even the gun-toting teenagers manning roadblocks and shooting up clubs in “Congo Boy” are played by real-life soldiers, with Fariala insisting he liked “the sincerity of what they give on camera.”

A four-country co-production, led by Bangui-based Makongo Films, “Congo Boy” was “a long journey” from the page to the screen, says Fariala. But he was determined to encourage audiences “to see refugees differently,” and to offer his life’s story as proof that “there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

For the 39-year-old Dusabejambo, this moment in Cannes was also a long time coming.

Her own journey began almost 20 years ago, when the recent college graduate was brought into the fold of the Almond Tree filmmaking collective, a Kigali-based production outfit set up by then-unknown filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, whose first feature, “Munyurangabo,” was filmed in Rwanda. Under Chung’s tutelage, Dusabejambo would go on to direct the Tribeca-premiering short film “Lyiza,” which began her ongoing cinematic exploration of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath.

Dusabejambo struggled for more than a decade to get “Ben’Imana” off the ground. The film, co-written with Delphine Agut, was developed at labs and residencies including Cannes’ La Fabrique Cinéma, the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops and the Ouaga Film Lab. It ultimately became an African majority co-production, produced by Ejo Cine.Ltd (Rwanda) and Princesse M Prod (Gabon) in co-production with Les Films du Bilboquet (France) and Duo Film (Norway).

That African DNA was essential to the film, which is set against the backdrop of post-genocide reconciliation efforts and centers on intimate portraits of women trying to rebuild their lives. Dusabejambo says she resisted the financers pressuring her to make the film in French or English, rather than her native Kinyarwanda.

“I couldn’t see this film being in any other language,” she says. “I really wanted to capture the weight of words. “It took a long time, but I didn’t want to lose the heart and soul of the film through the financing machine.”

Dusabejambo credits producers Samantha Biffot and Marie Epiphanie Uwayezu for their patience in allowing her to stick to her artistic vision, and for shepherding the ambitious co-production to completion. In the end, “Ben’Imana” used a cast composed almost entirely of non-professional actors, with a crew that the director says was “90% Rwandan and 100% African.”

While some of that cast and crew will be by Dusabejambo’s side when she climbs the famous stairs of Cannes’ Lumière Theater, the director says there are too many supporters to squeeze onto the red carpet — not least the many Rwandan women who shared their painful, intimate memories of the genocide with the director as she researched “Ben’Imana.”

“People gave so much to this film,” she says. “Now I have a story to go back and tell them.”