RETURN TO MANDIMA: ROBERT-JAN LACOMBE'S AFRICA

In 2011 Kwa heri Mandima (Goodbye, Mandima) won INVIDEO’s “Under 35” award. Already winner of the “Pardi di domani” award at the Locarno Festival in 2010, this short film uses photographic images to narrate the departure in 1996 of the author’s Franco-Dutch family from Zaire, as the Congo was then called, when he was a child. Nostalgia, identity, belonging are the issues that emerge between the lines of this delicate childhood memory. With Retour à Mandima (Return to Mandima) the Swiss filmmaker Robert-Jan Lacombe (born in Mandima in 1986, resident in Switzerland, where he studied art and design in Lausanne), documents the journey which, fifteen years later and now an adult, he decides to set out on, to the place where he will look for the friends, the places and the memories from that time. In the meantime, the country has been devastated by a bloody war. Some people have died, others have survived, work and have formed a family. The portrait of a country, of the complicity of ancient games, of bitter reflections on the wounds inflicted by poverty and conflict, the video deliberately proceeds at a spontaneous, amateur pace, as the camera accompanies the author’s emotional search for his “childhood brothers”.

As a homage to the “Under 35” award and in view of the recent sequel to this first work, INVIDEO presents the two works together, with the variations inherent in their technical and expressive development. (from INVIDEO 2012 catalogue)

Sunday 11 november at Spazio Oberdan, 05.00 pm, screening and meeting with the author

Kwa heri Mandima, Switzerland, 2010, 10’
Retour à Mandima, Switzerland, 2011, 39’