Kinshasa Symphony at the New York African Film Festival

Filmgoers can be a jaded bunch, so when an audience bursts into applause multiple times during a movie and leaps to its feet when the lights go up (complete with shouts of "Bravo!"), you know you've seen something special. Kinshasa Symphony, which opened the 18th New York African Film Festival last night, depicts the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, an amateur orchestra in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as its 200 members prepare for an open-air concert that includes Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Some musicians and singers are from what counts as Congo's middle class, while others barely eke out an existence in the Kinshasa slums. But the movie eschews details about the orchestra for a focus on the relationship its participants have to music, and watching Mireille Kinkina talk about the transporting effect of singing stands as one of the most moving things we've seen in a long time. "When I sing," she says, "I am entirely myself." In the Q-and-A afterward, orchestra director Armand Diangienda answered simply when someone asked what keeps them going: "passion." Kinshasa Symphony corrects the imbalance in so many representations of Congo, which emphasize the area's seemingly endless horrors, by revealing ordinary people struggling to connect with the extraordinary.

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