Yurugu, invisible lines, Yurugu, invisible lines

I don’t think Yurugu began with the desire to make a film. It began with a question that has accompanied me for many years: What happens to people when the relationships that make life possible are deliberately broken apart? The project of colonial dismemberment did not begin at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. That conference was among one of its most visible manifestations. It formalized invisible lines that had already begun separating people from their lands, communities from memory, labor from dignity, rivers from their names, and knowledge from the people who carried it. Colonialism taught us to perceive fragments as though they were complete worlds. I had spent years filming, reflecting, and beginning to shape the project on my own. I could have completed the film in that form. But the more I understood that the film was really about remembering—the restoration of relationships broken by the dismemberment—the more I realized that I also had to relinquish my own attachment to authorship.

I invited my friend Laurent Van Lancker to join as a co-maker because I wanted the process of making the film to embody what the film itself was asking of us. Together we filmed new material, brought our different sensibilities into dialogue, and re-edited the work into the film it eventually became. For me, colonization created at least three positions: the colonizer, the colonized, and those who became beneficiaries of the colonial project while also remaining shaped by its propaganda. I wanted Yurugu to become a space where that difficult conversation could take place with honesty and vulnerability. A space where my experience as someone from Congo and Laurent’s experience as someone from Belgium could meet in an attempt to recalibrate those invisible lines, without complacency and without denial. Our collaboration emerged from sitting with this question together. We were less interested in producing a shared interpretation than in cultivating a shared practice of listening. We spent time with archives, landscapes, gestures, conversations, doubts, and silences. The film became a place where our different ways of seeing could encounter one another without needing to become identical. For me, Yurugu occupies an important place because it asks how cinema might participate in the restorization* of relationships that history attempted to sever. In Soul-full Soil Cinema, the camera is not simply an instrument of observation. It becomes a participant in remembering. The film is less interested in reconstructing the past than in creating the conditions through which memory can become active again in the present.

In many African storytelling traditions, stories rarely begin by offering answers. They begin by preparing a relationship between the storyteller and those who listen. The opening voice in Yurugu begins with an Ejo-Lobi offering in that spirit. It does not explain the film. It prepares a way of seeing. We offer a narrative that refuses the illusion of a single authoritative voice. Colonial archives often speak with certainty. That certainty is itself a form of violence. They classify, define, and conclude. Soul-full Soil Cinema moves differently. Its structure resembles memory more than chronology. We have a Yira proverb that says: “There is no straight line in the forest.” I believe memory moves the same way. It returns. It circles. It echoes. One image awakens another. One sound calls another across generations. Time folds rather than simply advancing. The voices in the film come from many places: gnosis, colonial archives, oral traditions, philosophical reflections, lived experience, conversations, landscapes, and perhaps above all, from the questions that remain unanswered. Rather than illustrating an argument, each fragment invites another into dialogue. Meaning emerges through resonance rather than explanation. This is close to how I understand storytelling itself. A story is not something we consume. It is something we inhabit together.

The opening sequence is intentionally unsettling. In many ancestral cosmologies, living out of balance with the beings to whom we are related—animals, plants, rivers, forests—is a spiritual disturbance. Kinship is not symbolic; it is a way of participating in life itself. This is why the notion of “partitioning” Africa at the Berlin Conference and the act of sharing land, food, or life become radically different. One divides in order to possess. The other shares in order to sustain relationship. The image of butchery allows us to feel physically what the word “partition” often hides behind political language. But the animals in the film are much more than metaphors. Within ancestral ecological thinking, humans are never separate from the more-than-human world. We become who we are through our relationships with animals, plants, waters, soils, winds, and ancestors. I wanted to ask another question: What happens when colonial logic not only fragments human societies but also fractures our relationship with the living world? The various animal presences invite us to look beyond domination. They remind us that every community develops ethical ways of living with plural forms of life. Slaughter itself is not automatically violence. In many traditions, taking the life of an animal is surrounded by rituals of gratitude, reciprocity, and responsibility. Industrial extraction erased much of that relational ethic. It transformed living beings into commodities. This question extends far beyond animals. The same worldview that turns a cow into a commodity also turns forests into timber, rivers into infrastructure, minerals into resources, and eventually people into labor. The film therefore asks whether we can recover relationships instead of merely managing resources.

For me, images are never isolated objects. Every image already carries another image within it. Every landscape contains memories. Every monument contains absences. Every archive contains silences. The different visual languages emerge because no single image system can carry the complexity of colonial memory. Archival images often appear fixed, authoritative, and complete. By projecting them onto monuments and contemporary spaces, they become unstable again. They begin a conversation with another temporality instead of remaining enclosed within the past. Layering images allows different temporalities to coexist, much like compost, where different forms of matter decompose together until something new begins to grow. What appears to be rotoscope animation is actually thermal imaging. We wanted to enter into conversation with the cinematic tool itself. Once the camera only registers heat, the invisible line between a human body and a goat begins to dissolve. The camera becomes another way of listening. Rather than reproducing reality, it slows perception and allows us to notice gestures that might otherwise disappear. I often say that I am less interested in making images than in cultivating relationships between images. Soul-full Soil Cinema in Ejo-Lobi practice understands images as living entities. Like seeds, they travel, they transform, and they germinate differently depending on the ground in which they are received. So the heterogeneity of the film is not simply an aesthetic strategy. It is an act of recalibration. It reflects the understanding that memory itself is heterogeneous. It survives in archives, certainly, but also in bodies, landscapes, dreams, rituals, songs, spirits, and silences. The work of cinema is to allow these different memories to recognize one another again.

*Ancestral Ecology : An approach to knowledge that understands humans as participants within a larger community of life that includes plants, animals, rivers, soils, winds, ancestors, and future generations. Rather than separating culture from nature, Ancestral Ecology studies the relationships that make life possible. 

* Restorization: The ongoing practice of restoring relationships rather than simply repairing objects or returning to an imagined past. Restorization asks how people, communities, ecosystems, and memories might once again participate in one another’s flourishing.

* Soul-full Soil Cinema : A cinematic practice that approaches filmmaking as an ecological relationship rather than a process of representation. The camera becomes a participant in listening, remembering, and cultivating relationships between people, landscapes, histories, and the more-than-human world. Images are treated less as objects than as living beings capable of germinating differently depending on where and how they are encountered.

* Ejo-Lobi Temporal Composting : A way of working with time in which different histories, memories, images, and experiences decompose together, allowing new understandings and relationships to emerge. Like ecological compost, the past and the furniture are not discarded but transformed into fertile ground for new life.

* Recalibration : The practice of adjusting inherited ways of seeing, sensing, and relating after histories of dismemberment. Rather than replacing one certainty with another, recalibration invites new forms of attention and relationship.

*Living Archive : An archive that exists not only in documents and institutions but also in bodies, landscapes, songs, rituals, languages, ecological practices, and oral traditions. Memory survives because it continues to be lived.