When the makers of 'Benda Bilili!' heard the 'amazing' street music of the film's Congolese stars they were inspired to a rare level of commitment, they tell DONALD CLARKE
EIGHT YEARS ago two Frenchmen found themselves at a loose end. Renaud Barret, a graphic designer, and Florent de La Tullaye, a photographer, feeling that they were not achieving anything notable at home, climbed on a plane and made their way to central Africa. One ordinary day, while knocking about Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they encountered an astonishing band of musicians, many of whom had disabilities. Travelling about on modified bicycles and practising in the local zoo, Staff Benda Bilili, as the group are known, made an infectious noise, largely inspired by James Brown, whose performance at the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, in what was then Zaire, still casts a shadow.
“First we met the city, then we met the artists and immediately wanted to help them out,” says Renaud, who, with better English than La Tullaye, does all the talking. “It’s a music city. That’s often forgotten. It was once the capital of African music. Initially we met these guys and were just hanging out. Then we thought, ‘let’s do something for them’. They wanted to record an album, so we helped them do that.”
Aware that the band would need material for promotional purposes, the budding directors began to film. “It took us three years to realise we might have a movie here,” Renaud says.
The resulting film, Benda Bilili!, which details the band's rise from street musicians to bestselling stars of world music, has played to whooping crowds at film festivals around the world. The band members have achieved a degree of security and, almost by accident, Barret and de La Tullaye have become acclaimed documentarians.
“It wasn’t easy,” says Renaud, a square-headed man in a hip jacket. “The subject of Africa was like a scarecrow to French producers. Every time we pitched it, they said no. France is a very special country. It is still very culturally conservative.”
At any rate the film got made and went on to win fans across the globe. The directors are clearly brave. The mostly homeless musicians, some of them survivors of polio, had shown that they could take care of themselves on the street.
“The choice was simple from the very beginning,” Renaud says. “It was very clear. They were in the street for ages and nobody cared about them. We were the first to say, ‘your music is amazing’. For Ricky, who’s the leader, the choice was simpler. He was in his 50s. That’s an old man in the Congo. These stupid white guys with cameras were his last chance.”
Papa Ricky is indeed impressive. An articulate man, who clearly cares greatly for the local street kids, he emerges as the warm, compassionate heart of the project. Among his proteges is a young musician named Roger, who plays a sort of improvised one-string guitar, fashioned from a piece of wire and an old tin can.
The film is never patronising. There is no sense of the film-makers behaving in a patriarchal fashion. One can easily imagine how, under less committed directors, the project could have gone badly wrong.
“We couldn’t be credible to them if we just went back to a smart hotel every night,” Renaud says. “So we stayed in quite shabby hotels. We spent nights on the street with them. Even now we are learning to be directors, and Kinshasa made us what we are. We needed to live with the artists. It wasn’t a pose. We needed to.”
The climax of the Benda Bilili!experience occurred last May when the band and the directors made their way to the Cannes film festival. The picture provided a hugely successful opening event for the directors'-fortnight programme. As has become commonplace, the screening was greeted with a rapturous standing ovation. There were further cheers last month when Benda Bilili!won the audience prize at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
“Cannes itself didn’t mean anything to the musicians,” says Renaud. “They really had no idea what it was. There was all this bling-bling and they just remained totally Benda Bilili: ‘Yesterday we slept on the street, today we have a mattress.’ But what did move them was the audience reaction: a 20-minute standing ovation. What really touched them was moving people throughout the world.”
And did it move Renaud and La Tullaye also? The silent partner nods and shrugs. Renaud ponders. “We know we are not one of them. But we are always with them.”
Benda Bilili!opens tomorrow
