The Democratic Republic of Congo has been in the headlines as of late with reports about conflict and the advances of the so-called March 23 Movement rebels. But the colonial history and ecological significance of the country in Central Africa is getting the spotlight in a new essayistic film from photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji called The Tree of Authenticity (L’arbre de l’authenticité) that world premiered in the Tiger Competition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Sunday.
“Drawing on research from the 1930s, the film highlights the Congo Basin’s vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping global environmental balance over a century,” an IFFR synopsis highlights.
“Comparison with today’s data offers a stark reminder of how precarious our ecosystem has become.”
Structured in three parts, the film features personal testimonies, old photos, new video footage, historic speeches, and scientific findings to explore the legacy of the country’s Belgian colonization and its impact on human lives and nature. It brings viewers to the banks of the Congo River where the Yangambi INERA Research Station was a big scientific center in its heyday before turning into today’s mix of ruins and jungle. In the film’s first two parts, the audience dives into its past through the words and records of two scientists, Paul Panda Farnana and Abiron Beirnaert, who worked there between 1910 and 1950.
Baloji was inspired to make the film, his first solo feature as a director, to present a more differentiated picture of the country and its role in the world. “I received this Guardian article from a friend of mine who’s a curator to see if I was interested in digging into that project. It presented the Congo as paying for decades of war and not having any infrastructure as an explanation for nothing going right there,” he told THR. “I found it to be a continuation of a denial of other contributions – in science, in mineral resources, or even in terms of the environmental elements that are so important for the global world in modern life.”
Also, copper from Congo “was used in the First World War and was quite important,” he highlighted. “There’s also, of course, the uranium that was used for the atomic bomb that came from Congo. So I really wanted to look at all these kinds of elements in terms of extraction and in terms of data collected, but also from the Congolese and the colonial perspective.”
For the first two parts of the film, Baloji had a lot of material to put together from and about the two featured scientists.
But for the third part, he called on anthropologist Thomas Hendriks, whose book Rainforest Capitalism he knew, for writing help. “We decided that we should talk from the tree’s perspective,” focusing on the old tree that is referenced in the title, the filmmaker recalled. And so they wrote the final and most poetic part of the film together.
[The following paragraph contains a spoiler about the film’s ending.]
As they developed what the old tree would say, Baloji came up with a surprise twist for the film’s ending that he didn’t have planned originally – viewers would be led to understand at the very end that the whole film was narrated by nature rather than people. “So basically, the whole story is told by the tree,” he explained to THR. “At the beginning, I didn’t really have this idea. That really came together right at the end.”
Sound and soundscapes play a key role in the movie, which becomes more and more noticeable over time. “One needs to have the real natural sound,” Baloji emphasized. “But I also worked with two soundscape composers. One is Chris Watson who’s been recording natural sounds all over the world. Before this film, I made a short in collaboration with him by just using sounds that he recorded. One of them was the sound of ice melting which was fantastic. It was just crazy amazing sound.”
The visual artist and photographer lives and works between his hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brussels, Belgium, and has previously made short experimental films and documentaries in collaboration with others. But Tree continues key themes his creations revolve around. “I’ve long been working on the colonial past because I am from Congo,” Baloji said.
The filmmaker already has ideas for future movies. In particular, he would like to make the feature film Il Padre selvaggio (The Savage Father), an adaptation of the eponymous screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini written in 1962 for a film that the legendary Italian director never made. “I met the family and got to the right to make an adaptation,” Baloji told THR. “So this is what I’m kind of planning to start to work on next.”
The story explores the tribulations of the Congo through the encounter between an idealistic Italian teacher and Davidson, a Congolese student. Set in today’s Congo, the adaptation would explore how Davidson is torn between his teacher’s idealism and the influence of colonial legacy and traditional family education.
But first, Baloji is focused on showcasing Tree in Rotterdam. The IFFR 2025 runs through Feb. 9.
English (US) ·