Cinema
En 50 ans
Gérard de Boe · 1958
Synopsis
The film celebrates fifty years of the colonisation of Upper Katanga. It shows the arrival at Élisabethville airport of workers from Ruanda-Urundi for the mines, their passage through acclimatisation camps, then their settlement in the workers' towns. It then reviews the colony's achievements, schools, hospitals, maternity wards and orphanages, presented as so many advances.
Context
The film was produced by Paul Leleu, with cinematography by François Rents and Fernand Tack and music by David Van De Woestyne. It belongs to the last years of De Boe's work, made for the administration and the colonial companies; it presents the local population as a people to be instructed and modernised. The Royal Belgian Film Archive has made a copy freely accessible, and the Tarifa African film festival has taken it into its collection.
Who it is for
A short colour documentary of about twenty minutes, in French, to be seen as a document of the colonial period.
Prizes and reception
One of its author's last films, shot two years before his death, for the jubilee of a mining province.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.