Through this film, I wish to show Africa in the depths of its culture and traditions, in its timelessness and universality. I wish to show that, beyond the darkness and the tragic history of this continent where forces of death clash so violently, there is also life and happiness, that of the rituals, the singing and the dances. This journey to the heart of an Africa abandoned to its violence is above all be a hymn to life, just like the untameable vegetation hemming in the Congo River. On the banks, at different stretches of the journey, I filmed a people’s joys and suffering, the celebrations and ceremonies that punctuate existence such as a birth, a baptism, an initiation rite, a wedding, a death. I also revealed the fate of those who work and live along this river: boatmen or pirogue men, fishermen, hunters, farmers, foresters, trades people, military, rebels and missionaries.

This filmed ascent of the river takes us on a journey in Africa’s history, memory and destiny toward the source and origins of this country as big as a continent: Congo/Zaire. We move up the river basin, the largest in the world, from the mouth all the way to its source. We visit to those places that witnessed this country’s turbulent history, to the cities, towns and villages dotting the 2,716 miles of this river. Alternating the present and the past while questioning the future, the archives remind us of the history of African mythology heroes, bearers of conquests and domination, of revolt and emancipation. We search for the traces and vestiges of the personalities that created that country’s destiny – the explorers Livingstone and Stanley, the coloniser kings Leopold II and Baudouin 1st and the African leaders Lumumba, Mobutu and Kabila. 

But this journey is also a personal path, that of a film maker who has already devoted four films to this country. In Congo, I filmed popular revolt and the arrogance of power in Zaire, the Snake’s Cycle, the predatory and builder spirit in The Last Colonists  and the tragic vanity of a Shakespearean despot in Mobutu, King of Zaire. I want to continue this search of light and darkness, driven by the desire to go ever further into the mystery and depths of this country and its equatorial forest, in time and into the history of this majestic river that inexorably has flowed along for centuries and will for centuries yet to come.