An Experiment in Storytelling - Joris Pastema’s Stop Filming Us
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, stressing the crucial role that stories play in the world. Joris Pastema’s Stop Filming Us is a highly self-referential and deeply engaging cinematic meditation on the nature of stories told about Congo, particularly its North-Eastern region where the city of Goma is located.
The film opens with a scene of three men unpacking filming equipment from a suitcase, before cutting to a street scene with motorcycles and vehicles bearing the logos of international aid organizations. In a voice-over, spoken in Dutch, Pastema informs the viewer that he visited Goma ten years earlier to make a film for one of the many international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the region. In this role, he was only allowed to film from the safety of guarded vehicles because the streets were thought to be too dangerous. Part of the reason for this apprehension, Pastema admitted, was because of the onslaught of negative media reporting about the region. When he came back to the city for a second time, to work with a local organization, he got an opportunity to freely experience a different side of Goma; an encounter that made him question his prior negative perceptions about the Congolese reality.
Stop Filming Us is both an experiment and a response to a question that Pastema poses to himself in the opening scenes. Is he, a white European man, capable of portraying the kind of reality that he witnessed in the city of Goma during his visits? Pastema’s question is laden with significance, especially when regarded with historical context in mind. For many decades, Congo has been the epicenter of negative reporting about Africa by the Western press. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, Congo has been consistently portrayed as a primeval land inhabited by sullen human beings. In most Western media, Congo is chaotic, dangerous, and superstitious.
This negative media coverage of Congo and Africa, in general, has not gone unchallenged. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe wrote a scathing criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, calling Conrad a “bloody racist.” In the early 1980s, when Ethiopia was experiencing a severe famine, Jorgen Lissner decried what he called “poverty porn,” that is the habit of taking and sharing dehumanizing photographs of malnourished African children by Western photographers. More recently, Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina penned “How to Write about Africa,” a masterful satirical piece that lampooned the cliches that Western journalists resort to in their reportage of Africa. And despite its wild popularity, KONY 2012, a Youtube documentary by Invisible Children about the war in Northern Uganda, faced backlash for its perceived “white savior” attitude and failure to engage the locals in a meaningful way.
Pastema is likely aware of these pitfalls and he is eager to avoid them. For this reason, he approaches the entire filming exercise with a mindset of curiosity. In one of the early scenes, his crew follows Mugabo Baritegera, a young photographer from Goma, who is going around the city snapping pictures of people in the streets. Some of the women that Mugabo photographs protest and hide their faces behind their shawls. When asked what he will do with the photos, Mugabo explains that he is going to use them to showcase the women’s hardwork and heroism that encapsulates the positive side of Goma. Later, Mugabo says that he was inspired to take up photography after realizing that foreigners came to Goma with a fixed negative mindset.
Pastema’s gaze shifts from the photographer to a filmmaker who is seeking funding to complete a film about the relationship between Congo and its infamous, colonial master Belgium. The filmmaker, Bernadette Vivuya, consults the director of a local cultural center who points her, without any sense of irony, to the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, a Belgian institute that supports Congolese artists. Later in the film, we see Bernadette seeking help from a French cultural institution as well.
These scenes highlight a key problem that plagues the African creative landscape. The lack of financial means to pursue artistic projects forces African artists to seek support from European institutions, which are funded by the same countries that their art wishes to denounce. This conundrum recurs throughout Stop Filming Us and it raises the question of Neocolonialism: Are African countries truly decolonized if their own artists are forced to rely on the benevolence of their former colonial masters to create their art? How “good” can this art be if it has to meet certain criteria before it wins funding? Is it possible to counter negative stories about Africa when there is insufficient support for African creatives to do so?
When Pastema asks his local crew whether he has done anything that can be perceived as “Neocolonial” during the two weeks that he had been filming, he is told that giving biscuits to the children in the streets was one example. The Goma residents explain that despite Pastema’s good intentions, he gave his help without being asked for it, also without knowing what the children needed. Later on, we are treated to more scenes that raise and complicate the question of Neocolonialism. For instance, we meet Ley Uwera, a local female photographer who is working for an international aid organization. Ley admits that she takes her photos based on the guidelines provided by the NGO she works for, but she insists that there are certain kinds of photos she cannot take even if her job requires it. Regardless, some of the photos she has taken are misread by spectators, who assume that they were most likely taken by a foreigner because of their adherence to the NGO standards that are aptly compared to the colonial standards.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Stop Filming Us is Pastema’s constant quest for feedback from his hosts and his willingness to integrate their suggestions in his film. For instance, when someone in the crew says that a local director would have shot a certain scene in a completely different way, Pastema invites the photographer Mugabo to create a mini-film that follows a young boy navigating the streets of Goma. Mugabo’s short film dwells on the beauty that Goma embodies. Later, Pastema brings up the violence and hostility that he noticed when the crew was following Mugabo as he filmed. His hosts argue that beatings are regarded as a way of correcting those who do wrong in the society and in any case, that tradition was inherited from the Europeans who colonized Congo.
By the end of the film, the viewer can tell that Pastema’s intentions are as noble as he makes them to be in the beginning. This is particularly evident in the final scene when he screens an initial version of the film to the local audience and listens to their questions and feedback. The film also ends on an optimistic note for local art, as we see Goma’s residents flocking to Mugabo’s photography exhibition.
Stop Filming Us is not only visually gorgeous but also a brave experiment that interrogates how we tell and consume stories about others. Regardless of your background, this film will force you to re-evaluate your outlook not just about North Eastern Congo but other marginalized communities as well.
The film is available on Kanopy free to public library patrons with their library card (https://www.kanopy.com/product/stop-filming-us-0) and it is available for educational licensing on at (https://www.videoproject.com/stop-filming-us.html