Work in Progress
Returning for a second edition, Work in Progress is a Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme strand highlighting forthcoming feature-length films.
For 2021’s Work in Progress, we will focus on Congolese director and visual artist Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up at Night (2022) his feature film debut currently in production. Rising Up at Night is a co-production between Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, Germany and Burkina Faso. We will discuss the work in progress while also sharing a previous short directed by Makengo as part of the Festival’s online programme.
After an election that has shaken its already precarious political and economic stability, DR Congo is trying to revive its project to build Africa’s largest power plant on the Congo River. Kinshasa, the capital, remains in darkness while its population struggles for access to light. Rising Up at Night subtly portrays a population that is reinventing itself in spite of everything, in an environment plagued by the violence and beauty of Kinshasa’s nights and the uncertainty of the next day.