Benda Bilili!

Directed by Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye PG cert, Light House, Dublin, 86 min

A WINNER OF the audience award at the recent Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, this French documentary brings street cred to the dread phrase "crowd- pleaser". The story of a group of Congolese musicians, many disabled, who stormed the world music festivals of Europe, Benda Bilili!makes the toe tap as it wrings for tears. If there are easier, more pleasing ways to broaden your horizons, we can't say what they might be.

The film’s directors spent four years filming the ensemble. In 2004, the Frenchmen encountered Staff Benda Belili (the group’s name translates as “Staff Beyond Appearances”) on the streets of Kinshasa. Impressed by their free- wheeling rhythms and story-based songs, the film-makers determined to get them into a studio. The gang eventually made it to Europe and have now achieved a degree of success and security.

As a documentary, Benda Bilili!delivers comprehensive portraits of its characters and provides vivid snapshots of life in Kinshasa. We see the band, most of them disabled by polio, navigating their adapted bicycles, pedals operated by hand, towards their improvised rehearsal area in the open spaces of the city zoo. We watch energetic football games. We listen as young Roger, a dab hand with an instrument constructed from wire and an empty can, receives surprised praise from his family. This thing got him to Europe?

Such an enterprise could easily have ended up as patronising and self-important (look at us nice bourgeois westerners – we’re so kind). But, keeping themselves largely out of the frame, the film-makers allow the musicians – notably Papa Ricky, the group’s loveable father figure – to tell their own stories. Much of that narrative emerges through song.

Mostly, they are sad, heart- rending tales. (Not many popular tunes seek rhymes for "polio".) But the positive energies and rhythms still manage to raise the spirits. Watch Benda Bilili!and prepare to punch the air.