Fiche Film
Cinéma/TV
LONG Métrage | 2006
Kinshasa Palace
Pays concerné : République démocratique du Congo
Durée : 75 minutes
Genre : comédie dramatique
Type : fiction

Français

Entre fiction et documentaire, une quête sur les traces de Max, un frère mystérieusement disparu, autour des thèmes de l'absence, de l'abandon et de la solitude.



Max et son frère sont les derniers d'une famille de 7 enfants, tous nés à Kinshasa. Très vite ils ne se retrouvent plus que deux, car les autres partent en pensionnat à l'étranger. Ils vivent une enfance heureuse, jusqu'au jour où ils partent aussi pour les études qui commencent par les éloigner. Du côté de Nantes, Max fait sa vie avec un amour d'adolescence. Ils ont trois enfants à qui il rêve de faire découvrir les lieux de son enfance.



Les années passent, Max se sépare et s'installe chez son frère à Paris, un solitaire dont on ne sait pas grand chose. Mais un jour, après avoir déposé ses enfants à la gare, il disparaît en demandant à son frère de ne pas le chercher.



Suite aux appels des enfants, son frère se lance sur sa trace, à travers les films de Max ramenés de ses derniers voyages.

Il découvre que Max pose de drôles de questions à ses parents, mais aussi à ses enfants. Toutes les questions tournent autour de l'absence, l'abandon et la solitude.



Les mois passent, Max ne donne toujours pas signe de vie. Son frère, qui était en rupture avec le reste de la famille, s'en rapproche. Il se réconcilie même avec son père, devient un oncle responsable pour ses neveux.



Un jour une lettre arrive pour Max du Cambodge, elle fait état de sa présence là-bas. Son frère s'y rend, trouve la trace de Max, mais il n'y est apparemment plus.

Dans les ruines où Max passait le plus clair de son temps, son frère lui apprend que leur père est décédé, et qu'il compte voyager avec les enfants à Kinshasa.



Durée : 75’

Type : fiction LM

Format : Béta numérique, couleur

Thèmes : mémoire, fratrie

Langue : Français

Année : 2006

Pays : France, République démocratique du Congo



Interprètes : Zeze Motta, Ambre Laplaine, Anna Maria Laplaine, Gaspard Laplaine, Iris Laplaine, Zeka Laplaine



Réalisateur : Zeka Laplaine

Image : Octavio Espirito Santo

Son : Christophe Couget-Moreno

Musique : Gilles Fournier

Montage : Agnès Contensou

Musique originale : Gilles Fournier



Production : Les Histoires Weba, Bakia Films

Distribution : Les Histoires Weba

English

Kinshasa Palace
Max is missing. His mother in Congo is worried and his family in Europe bewildered. His brother Kaze finds the video cassettes Max shot in Kinshasa and Lisbon, and sets out to find his sibling, who left without warning, « like a thief. » Styled as an intimate diary, Kinshasa Palace roves from Paris to Congo and Portugal, eventually flying all the way to Cambodia in search of the elusive Max. But there is more than one mystery at play here. Beyond the answer to Max’s whereabouts lies the more provocative question, Who is Kaze?


Director Zeka Laplaine plays Kaze; the anagram is an obvious clue. In his previous film, (Paris: XY), he played a character named Max. Kinshasa Palace playfully smudges the line between fiction and memoir, constructing an investigation of a family scattered across three continents. Kaze and Max’s father is Portuguese, but sits in Lisbon reminiscing about his days in Congo (which he insists on calling Zaire). Their mother has stayed in Kinshasa and cannot imagine living in Europe where, as she says, you have to like solitude and are likely to die sooner.

Guided only by traces of Max, including a totemic bracelet and a red notebook he left behind, Kaze continues his pursuit. As he edges closer to answers, the scenes of his search are accompanied by spoken memories, Congolese pop music and the most melancholy of Portuguese songs. The film opens up once in Cambodia, where Max seems to be just around the corner.

It may be that semi-fiction is the ideal form for a film dealing with Congo. Real events can seem too extreme for drama and real people too circumspect for documentary. In employing a questing, hybrid form for Kinshasa Palace, Laplaine gives himself the freedom to superimpose memory and contested histories and to layer narrative and reflection. Laplaine taps deep emotions in the story of a family defined by its migrations; they are not so much scattered as projected across oceans.

Cameron Bailey
(Toronto International Film Festival website)


A filmmaker travels across Paris, Lisbon, Kinshasa, and Cambodia in search of a missing brother in this provocative cinematic whatsit, a mix of family mystery, colonial exposé, and Chris Marker-style essay-poem. Filmmaker José Zeka Laplaine plays Kaze, a Paris-based Congolese immigrant looking for his missing brother Max, but finding only dreams and memories: of Congo in the 1970s, when Muhammad Ali was on the television and hope was in the air, or of their father, a white man now returned to Europe while their mother, as proud as ever, stayed in Kinshasa. Created out of family photos, stock footage, and home-video images of several generations of a family still caught between Europe and Africa, Kinshasa Palace refuses to say where reality ends and fiction begins; like its subject Max, it enjoys getting lost along the borders. Between the lines, though, lurk the ramifications of colonialism, family displacement, and the global African diaspora.

-Jason Sanders
African Film Festival – BAM-PAF (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive) 2009 | www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Director: Zeka Laplaine
Country: Democratic Republic of the Congo/France
Year: 2006
Languages: French, Tshiluba, Portuguese, English, and Cambodian with English subtitles, Color, Beta SP

Time: 75 minutes
Film Types: Colour/Digital Betacam

Production Company : Les Histoires Weba

Producer: Michael Krumpe, Kapinga Wa M’bombo
Screenplay: Zeka Laplaine
Cinematographer: Octavio Espirito Santo
Editor: Agnès Contensou
Sound: Christophe Couget-Moreno
Music: Gilles Fournier

Principal Cast: Zeze Motta, Iris Laplaine, Gaspard Laplaine, Ambre Laplaine, Anna Maria Laplaine, Zeka Laplaine

Zeka Laplaine was born in Ilebo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He studied acting at the Parallax École d’Acteurs in Brussels, where he also wrote screenplays. He has acted in several films, including Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (06), also playing at this year’s Festival. He has directed the short film Le Clandestin (96) and the features Macadam tribu (96), (Paris: XY) (01), Le Jardin de papa (04) and Kinshasa Palace (06).


FESTIVALS / AWARDS

2009 | African Film Festival – BAM-PAF (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive) | BERKELEY, Ca, United States | January 25, 2009 – February 22, 2009 | www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
* Selected

Toronto Film festival

Fespaco 2007
* World Premiere
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