Reporting from Paris — — In the long history of music, there have been improbable success stories. But even in such company, as a drunk man in the French documentary "Benda Bilili!" argues, there has never been anything like the Congolese "street-orchestra" Staff Benda Bilili.
Or as the band's 55-year-old leader Leon "Papa Ricky" Likabu explained during the group's recent stop in Paris to support the film's opening: "Since God created the world, no one has seen five or six disabled guys play music like this."
Formed by paraplegic and sometimes homeless middle-aged men in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo — and one of the most dysfunctional cities on Earth — Staff Benda Bilili now numbers five musicians in wheelchairs and three physically able younger men, including a teen prodigy named Roger Landu who has learned to play rock, funk and rumba with an instrument that he invented by attaching a piece of wire to a large jam jar. He presses or pulls the wire with one hand to alter the pressure and change notes with the astounding dexterity of a guitar hero — albeit one playing a strange, shrunken one-string guitar that he calls a "satonge."
Likabu recalled the path that led him here to the small garden of Le Comptoir Général, a funky Paris loft space, as members of the band prepared to play an acoustic gig for the winners of an online contest.
It's a long way from Kinshasa, but the musician concluded long ago that he had to find a way to take his band across the world. He couldn't have imagined that his fellow musicians, who slept nightly on cardboard "mattresses" illuminated by burning trash, might end up here, let alone in tailored suits at the Cannes Film Festival.
After all, Kinshasa is a city that has in recent years swelled with refugees from one of the deadliest wars since World War II, one that continues in pockets on the other side of the vast country. Now an anchor for international humanitarian efforts, the central African city is a place where those with physical deformities — and five of the band members are afflicted with polio — are generally treated like pariahs.
But in 2003, Likabu started a "handicapped band" that merged Congolese rhythms with those from the Americas and Europe. Disabled band members would ride their customized, motorized three-wheeled wheelchairs (that look like something out of "Mad Max") to the banyan tree in the city's scruffy zoo to rehearse far from the urban din. When they had no money for gas for their wheelchairs, street children — sometimes including their own — would push their slow-moving musical caravan there.
About a year later, on a strangely calm night in central Kinshasa, a pair of intrepid French documentary filmmakers stumbled upon the ragtag band of musicians playing a mournful ancestral blues-rumba for a cluster of shege, the city's ubiquitous and much-feared street children. "We were a bit overwhelmed to see this group of disabled guys playing music with homeless kids all around," explains documentary filmmaker Florent de La Tullaye. But musically, he adds, "We were thunderstruck."
What they heard was hard to categorize, but it had a lot in common with the hand-to-mouth lives that the band's members carved out on the streets of Kinshasa. They played instruments that they made themselves with materials at hand, infusing their ramshackle guitars, drums, and, especially, the satonge with a distinctive, gritty and often sorrowful tone — even in some songs that grooved toward euphoria.
He and his collaborator, Renaud Barret, immediately sensed that Staff Benda Bilili's music soothed the tense and desperate street children, who are regularly chased from storefronts, bars and restaurants by guards armed with sticks and clubs. Many of the band's songs, which highlight the ebb and flow of life on the streets, speak directly to the experiences of those kids.
Barret and La Tullaye decided to make a film focusing on the band, and Likabu immediately welcomed them. "The white guys have arrived," the bandleader said with his understated humor. "That's cool. We'll work with you."
Only later did the filmmakers discover the substance of the lyrics, mostly sung in Lingala with snippets of French (a legacy of colonial Belgium). Band members refer to themselves as "street journalists" for songs that bear witness to their urban experiences. The words offer wisdom about street life, encourage empathy with and humbleness toward those who sleep beneath the stars or who have been struck down by polio and do so without sentimentality and often with a striking sense of humor. (One of their slogans is, "We're all handicapped, ain't we?)
During five years of filming, Staff members endured personnel changes, a fire that left them homeless, the disappearance of a child drummer who was never seen again, and several deaths close to the band before the documentary was completed.
