iN REVIEW: Tongo Saa / Rising Up At Night

Tongo Sa / Rising Up at Night: A Nocturnal Hymn to Resistance

Reviewed for iN NAIROBI by Nik Jackson

In the shadows of Kinshasa’s humming grid and the embers of its endless blackouts, Tongo Sa / Rising Up at Night unspools like a whispered prayer to the dark. Directed by Nelson Makengo, this intimate, haunting documentary is less a film in the conventional sense and more a luminous meditation—a poem carved in flickering candlelight and diesel fumes, where survival becomes an act of quiet defiance.

There is no voiceover, no guiding hand. Instead, Makengo crafts a lyrical, vérité portrait of the Congolese capital at night, where power outages are routine and yet, paradoxically, light—the pursuit of it, the making of it, the sheer need for it—becomes a central character. We meet men stringing cables across rooftops like veins, women hawking fried snacks in makeshift lantern glow, and children doing homework beneath the pale light of shared bulbs. In the absence of electricity, community pulses. Resistance breathes. Life glows, defiantly.

Makengo, who is both director and cinematographer, brings the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet to his frames. There are images here that linger long after the screen fades to black: a solitary lightbulb swinging in the wind, a small radio murmuring into the silence, faces emerging from shadow like ancestral spirits. His camera is patient, observant, reverent. It does not impose; it bears witness.

What Tongo Sa offers is not outrage but intimacy. This is not a film that screams against injustice—it murmurs it. And in doing so, it echoes louder. Through silences, through stillness, through night after night of candlelit striving, it reveals a city refusing to be extinguished.

For a Nairobi audience, there’s something deeply resonant in Makengo’s gaze. We, too, know what it means to dance with darkness, to stitch joy and ingenuity into the cracks of broken systems. There’s solidarity in the rhythm of the struggle, an African continuity in the quiet audacity of hope. Makengo isn’t just filming Kinshasa—he’s capturing the DNA of resistance that lives in cities like Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar.

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In the end, Tongo Sa / Rising Up at Night doesn’t ask for pity. It demands presence. It calls us to bear witness—not to suffering alone, but to resilience, to communion, to the incandescent beauty of people rising, again and again, into the night.