Félicité

Every night Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya) sings in a bar in Kinshasa. When she raises her voice, the noise of the city turns into music and the chaos of the streets into pure energy. But when her son is taken to hospital after a motorcycle accident, a feverish search for money, dignity and hope begins. Alain Gomis follows this proud, vulnerable woman through a Kinshasa poised between scrapyard and dream, where nothing is stable — not the electricity, not morality, not even the fridge, which keeps breaking down.

Between the rhythms of the Congolese music collective Kasai Allstars and the suspended sounds of Arvo Pärt, the film opens a space in which music becomes an interior monologue. “Félicité” is portrait, allegory and love story at once: a mother, a mechanic, a son — bound together by the necessity of carrying on. Gomis does not narrate about Africa but out of it, with a sensuousness that fuses documentary hardness with poetic trance. And so Kinshasa becomes an organism that breathes, sweats and sings. At the end Félicité stands upright — she does not become a symbol but a voice, one that comes out of the darkness and reminds us that dignity is sometimes nothing other than the insistence on going on singing, against everything that wants to silence us.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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