EXAMEN D’ÉTAT

In front of the Athénée Royal high school in Kisangani, there are still large puddles, the remains of a flood. “Athénée Royal? Athénée rubbish, rather!”: the tone is set, a mix of antipathy towards this venerable institution and the teenagers’ need to pass,come what may, the Congolese baccalaureate, dubbed the “State exam”. Just as, in Atalaku, he managed to film both the individual and the crowd during the presidential election campaign in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dieudo Hamadi somehow manages to slip into a heterogeneous group of external candidates that are mounting a “rebel plan” – a shared house in which to revise. Graduate first? No, first pay the “teacher’s bonus”, or else he’ll kick you out of his class, even in front of the camera. The educational system, the microcosm of a society where corruption and resourcefulness go hand in hand, is not really the object of analysis. It is a springboard into a story: the expelled students spend two months among strangers, recover their textbooks, pray together, have their pens blessed and recruit students more literate than themselves. Following more closely the trajectory of Joël, who is determined not to end up as a market porter, Dieudo Hamadi creates an intimate and ultimately poignant counterpoint to his group portrait. (Charlotte Garson)