Viva Riva!!!!!!!

Last month I had the privilege to attend the National Black Arts Festival’s Film Series. I watched five movies from 2:30pm to 12:30am. They were: Stubborn as a Mule!, Shaft or Sidney Poitier: The Emergence of Black Masculinity in Comic Book, Viva Riva!, The Inheritance, and FunkJazz Kafe: Diary of A Decade.

While all the movies were interesting my favorites were Viva Riva! and FunkJazz Kafe: Diary of A Decade.

Viva Riva! is a Congolese repackaging of the revenge thriller and it has distinctive African beats that I absolutely love. I sat on the edge of my seat the whole movie. Unlike an American revenge thriller the viewer has no idea what is going to happen next, there are actually, “Really?” moments.

Opening in Kinshasa, a chaotic city of hustlers, casual sex and easy violence, we are immediately made aware of a fuel shortage. The story centers on Riva, played by Patsha Bay Mukuna, an incorrigible thief who has just arrived from Angola with a truckload of stolen gas. Riva is a small time operator, who, with a pocket full of cash (U.S. dollars, the preferred currency of the black market) sets out in this seductively vibrant and lawless town to have a good time.

Things take a turn when Riva falls in love with Nora, played by Manie Malone, the light skinned kept woman of a local gang lord. In a subplot the fellows Riva stole the gas from arrive in Kinshasa wanting nothing more than their gas and Riva’s death.

Everybody, from the priest to the female commander, is out for themselves; conniving and swindling with ease, crime and corruption grease every transaction. There are sex scenes that would have been cut from American films and the violence is colorful and glitzy.

Viva Riva! is indicative of the lawlessness, sexism, exploitation and anarchism in the deeply troubled Congo. The only educated person in the movie, Nora, makes it clear, "In this country, money is like poison. In the end, it always kills you."

TOMORROW: FunkJazz Kafe: Diary of a Decade