In the Democratic Republic of Congo, smugglers thrive on extracting resources from the vast country, from diamonds to minerals to ivory.
The writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga reverses the path of contraband in his debut feature film, Viva Riva!.
In Munga's drama, smugglers sneak petrol into the energy-starved land from neighbouring, oil-rich, Angola. The venture slams them head-on into rival gangsters and corrupt officials, as the film lurches from one neighbourhood to the next, introducing the audience to a sprawling, troubled metropolis.
Explosively violent, the film has a tender side. It is an improbable love letter to Munga's hometown.
Viva Riva! is the first dramatic feature made in Congo by a Congolese director. It is also the first feature that is mostly in the local language, Lingala.
Munga, 38, based his script on young smugglers working the Angola-Kinshasa trade. "I wanted to make my film about Kinshasa. The smuggling was the Kinshasa mentality - these are self-confident guys who don't care what happens tomorrow. They come into Kinshasa with all that cash to party in all the parts of Kinshasa that I wanted to talk about - the lighter ones and the darker ones. They were the trigger for the story."
Unsurprisingly, they hold a mirror up to a self-confident new director who is already at work on a second feature.
On June 6, Viva Riva! was judged Best African Movie at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards. It was the first time a prize was offered in this category by MTV.
Shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and in Berlin, Viva Riva! earned six African Academy Awards, including honours for best film, best director, and best cinematographer.
Munga's stylish drama has anointed him as an emerging star of an African new wave. He views that description warily. "To have a wave you have to be more than one," he said on a recent visit to New York, a city with a growing African population. "I'm not the only filmmaker, but I'm the only one making feature films of this type in Congo right now."
"What we can say," he noted, "is that with different producers and directors in France and in Africa, we see the need to make films for Africans."
African audiences who have seen Viva Riva! seem ready to identify with Munga and his scrappy film.
"The young people loved it. They said 'this is what's happening'," said Mahen Bonetti, director of the African Film Festival in New York, who screened the film this spring. Viva Riva! opened commercially in New York and Los Angeles at the weekend.
The film's detractors fault it for excessive violence and for a depiction of corrupt anarchy that perpetuates doomsday forecasts for the continent. Munga's admirers, among them Bonetti, who is from Sierra Leone, see honest hard-edged realism. "Just like it was in South Africa, people are living each day as if it's their last, so you have these extremes in the Congo, where there's been war as long as many people living there can remember," she said.
Munga said his inspiration for Viva Riva! was not the French New Wave of the 1960s or the gangster sagas of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, but a movie from half-way around the world. "Stray Dog, by Akira Kurosawa, from 1949," he said, citing the work of Japan's post-war master at its most raw and elemental.
"I'm inspired by people who look at reality before starting to work," said the director, who was trained in Belgium.
"A lot of filmmakers have influenced me in my life, and they still do today," he noted, "but in Kurosawa's project, what was really interesting was the story of a detective who loses his gun. He goes looking for the person who stole his gun, and in chasing that person, he goes to various places in Tokyo, and you discover Tokyo after the Second World War. You discover it as a documentary. It was a perfect combination between an effective narrative and a documentary background. To depict Kinshasa today, I really wanted to have that background. That makes the difference.
"Most of the people won't travel to Kinshasa, but they will have a sense - even through a detective film, a violent film, a thriller - they will have a sense of the streets, of interaction with people, of the problems with money. All the details are there because they come from reality."
Munga makes no apologies for going straight into gangster territory. "I don't go simply for action. I take action, I take the genre film, the gangster movie, as a vehicle to get closer to reality.
"Also, we have to be honest," Munga said, breaking with the African custom of speaking politely about one's elders, "I think all these filmmakers who have created the image of African cinema, among them Ousmane Sembene [the celebrated Senegalese art film director, 1923-2007], they have failed to reach out to the audience, to the African audience. They have failed to create a bond.
"The Nigerians did," added Munga, citing the no-budget Nollywood industry in Africa's most populous country. "Bad movies, bad storytelling, but what they have achieved is they have represented on screen a fantasy or an imagery of Africa that Africans have about themselves.
"That's quite an achievement, since the others in west Africa went directly to the complex auteur thing. With the complex thing, the African audiences didn't get it, which is sad. I've tried to achieve a combination of both in Viva Riva!, and the critics in Africa have supported the film, and the audience has reacted positively."
Critics have praised performances from Viva Riva!'s cast - the musician Patsha Bay Mukuna in the title role of Riva the smuggler, the newcomer Manie Malone as the night club diva Nora, and the Angolan actor Hoji Fortuna as a vindictive crime boss.
Fortuna, now based in New York, was Viva Riva!'s only professional actor, although Malone is studying acting in Paris. Born to a mother from Ivory Coast and a father from Paris, Malone came to Kinshasa to shoot the film after leaving Africa at the age of three. Having learnt to speak Lingala there, she left Congo ready for more challenges. "My first movie was with arms and guns around me on the set. So I've had this experience," she declared in English that is still a work in progress, "I am not afraid of nothing."
For a film fraught with the logistics of working in a developing country at war, Viva Riva! was not made on the cheap. Munga's total budget was €1.8 million (Dh9.5m), which came from Studio Canal + in Paris, with additional funds from the European Union and the Belgian government.
Optimists eager for a new wave to rise in Congo and elsewhere in Africa predict that the challenges of filming could help build a generation of tough, resilient filmmakers. They note that African cinema's overlap with music in its talent and its potential global reach is a crucial asset.
Yet in Congo today, a country of 71 million people, there are no cinemas, which means that pirating is inevitable, giving a director an audience, but not an income. "We have to create a market and a circuit for showing films which would enable filmmakers to stay in Africa," said Munga.
Sounding like a character from Viva Riva!, the director said he won't wait for multiplexes to open in Kinshasa before he makes another movie: "For me the priority is first to make films. Before watching them, you have to have films."
