Congo Rising Welcomes You
We are preparing for the future by powering the imagination (arts, literacy, film) and by powering businesses, hospitals, and homes through solar mini grids (in connection with the Inergy organization).
The Arts
We teach literacy in cooperation with African Storybooks, through recording and publishing oral histories, and through teaching simple book binding.
Book binding in Lodja, DRC
As we began our work, we realized we needed to create a way to produce books, not just import them. Libraries in our work area are either damaged or non-existant.
African Storybook
We have distributed hundreds of French storybooks to people in and around Lodja. We have also worked with African Storybooks in translating books into the Tetela dialect.
Teams
We work with pioneering filmmakers in the DR-Congo to restore cinema to the country. (It was lost thirty years ago.)
We use film and the arts to catalyze educational outreach.
The equipment we have purchased is shared by numerous nascent filmmakers in the Congo. This is consistent with our goals to empower teams, not individuals.
Art
Art is the parent of resourcefulness.
POWER
There are no rich countries which are poor in energy. We facilitate building solar power grids.
Power for a whole city
How we Choose our Projects
These are our standards:
We support projects, not individuals.
We insist that the workforce comprise teams which have shown that they work in mutual support and integrity.
All projects must be sustainable. We need to know what the initiatives will look like in five or ten years.
Having successfully released our first film in coordination with Bimpa Productions, we are ready to move up to greater goals.
As we have worked in the Sankuru Province, we have noted how important Lumumba is to the people there and how influential his legacy is. We have also shown that we can film in the most rural areas of the DR-C. We filmed scenes for our first film, Heart of Africa near Lumumba's birthplace. Our filmmakers took lighting, cameras, and their strong wills into the deep forest which Lumumba knew as a boy.
Cinematic Art
“When I looked at life through the camera, I felt like I could finally see it.”
― Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen
Film making provides a road to sharing instruction in anything, insights on everything, and a new lens to see dimensions of beauty--all vital in a post-war situation.
Film training and screening in a country which lost its cinemas thirty years ago
Our Goals
Bringing Light to the Congo and the Congo to Light
1) We seek to show the beauty of the Congo and the strength of its people. Almost all media about the Congo focuses on the country's poverty and violence in the east. There is another story, and we intend to tell it--theough Lumumba's history and other stories
2) We believe that power empowers, that when we enable the people to light their clinics, shops, and homes, we help them raise themselves to a new level. Our goal is to power the town of Lodja and a section of Kinshasa.
3) In the nearly sixty years since Lumumba's assassination, the Congo has become the poorest country on earth, according to statistics. The resources in the Congo make it the richest in mineral wealth, however. We want to tool the people to use the wealth alreay around them.
“The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations…Africa will write its own history. It will be a history of glory and dignity.”
Patrice Lumumba
What happens when solar power lights up a whole village? We all will see!
Better economy, better health, better schools, more resources
Bimpa Production
Team in the Congo
Our team in the Congo is committed to establishing cinema in their country, to training nascent filmmakers, running an annual film festival, and taking film into the far reaches of the Congo. Long-term goals include the establishment of a film school and an arts-based university. For now, the objective is to provide education and inspiration to the whole country through film.
Scenes from Sankuru--one of the most beautiful places on earth
