The meeting happened a little by chance, the love at first sight was radical. It is 2003, Renaud Barret is 33 years old and is wandering in Paris with a job as a graphic designer in advertising. A journalist friend got out of this comfortable boredom by urging her to follow her to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a report. Landing in Kinshasa, and stalling of the seat belt. “I was immediately blown away by this city. By this energy, this permanent chaos, this anarchitecture, this disurbanism. All this with an extreme suffering of the population, but also a kind of incomprehensible genius with regard to music, creation, everywhere ”, summarizes Renaud Barret, on the occasion of the cinema release, Wednesday January 15, of his new documentary, System K.
The electric shock is liberating: he decides to put everything down, buys cameras and leaves to settle in this electric city, soon joined by his best friend, the photoreporter Florent de La Tullaye. In contrast to “Regent life, the field of possibilities quite blocked in Paris”, Kinshasa reveals itself “A city wide open to any slightly hysterical and crazy proposition”. The duo starts and “Films a real, personal odyssey”, the capital becomes the framework and the raw material of their work. In almost five years on the spot, three films have been self-produced, including the documentary Benda Bilili!, surprise success in 2010 (some 330,000 admissions), on a flamboyant orchestra of disabled ghetto musicians.
Naked performers
Outside the musical sphere, in this “City of strong men” who had hosted the legendary fight between Mohamed Ali and George Foreman in 1974, Renaud Barret has already delved into the world of boxing with Victoire Terminus, the boxers of Kinshasa (2006), before embarking on the adventure of System K, in the footsteps of the city’s visual artists. It all starts with a new shock. In 2011, after a series of fraudulent elections, he encountered young naked performers. “I hang out a lot on the streets in Kinshasa, and yet I had never seen that. Nudity is something very codified. If we get naked, it’s because something very serious is happening ”, he says. In the repressive context of power, he realizes that the “Dispute” comes from these young people, “Who theorize in their corner and go out into the street”.
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