VOYAGE AU CONGO
Dir. André Gide and Marc Allégret
France/French Equatorial Africa/Belgian Congo
1927, 101 Min.
Silent
In 1926, French author André Gide — who later won the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature — set sail for French Equatorial Africa and Belgian Congo with his 25 year-old lover and former student, Marc Allégret. Their journey, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, covered thousands of miles miles through present day DR Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, and Cameroon. VOYAGE AU CONGO is a document of the duo’s trip, over railway, river and foot, to visit colonial agents and indigenous communities, and is one of the earliest feature-length ethnographic documentaries to be made on the entire continent.