Cathartic cycles

Filmmaker Djo Tunda Wa Munga on art’s ability to heal trauma

Delivering a keynote address on the weighty topic “Can The Arts Heal Trauma?” is no easy feat, making it impressive that the jovial Djo Tunda Wa Munga started off with a light-hearted remark that had his audience laughing within the first five minutes.

“Personally, I think that the relation between art and trauma is obvious,” states the DRC-born filmmaker in a soothing French accent. “Look at many of your famous artists – Dostoevsky, Michelangelo, Victor Hugo, Nietzche – all of these guys, they had problems,” he says to an entertained audience, before elaborating on the journey that artists take to understand themselves and how that healing is then often transferred to the audience.

Besides famously saying that “A director makes only one movie in his life; then

he breaks it into pieces and makes it again”, French filmmaker Jean Renoir also said that he makes films for only about five or six viewers. Building on Renoir’s

quote, Munga uses his own personal experience as a filmmaker to describe

how artistic texts have a “story underneath the story”.

After finishing his studies in Fine Art in Belgium, Munga went on to join the National Film School of Belgium and spent a few years working in the European film industry. He moved back to the DRC in 1999, however, because it felt like the right thing to do.

“When I started working in the DRC, I realised that the country and its people

needed help. They had come through the worst times, and I knew that I could use film to help people reveal themselves and their own identities, so I started

officially organising training programmes and doing a lot of social documentary,” he says.

This is where the Renoir quote comes in. Munga says that it’s only once the creative process on his side is over, and he starts working with production teams, actors and collaborators that he understands what the real essence of his stories are. An actor will pick up on an underlying theme’s significance, or comment on a part of the story that Munga wrote subconsciously, and slowly the pieces of the puzzle of why he wrote that specific story start to take shape.

Taking it one step further, Munga also says that it’s only once he has grasped this, only once the healing within himself occurs, that the healing can then wash over his audience .

“I discovered film by accident when I was quite young, but I wasn’t conscious that I was healing myself. It’s only now, at almost 39 years old, that I realise my work helped me with problems; helped me to wake up in the morning,” he confesses.

Munga describes the creative cycles that his artistic drive would bow to as follows: boredom with “normal” life, getting depressed, isolating oneself and losing oneself in one’s own dreams and creativity and then responding

to the need for a release of some kind.

“We’re making films, but at the deepest levels we are also helping ourselves,” he explains. “How many times do you find yourself reading a book, for example, and suddenly you understand something really personal; you understand something that has happened to you or that relates to your own life, even if it’s not in a direct way?” Munga asks.

“I think that through the journey that the artist has, by struggling with himself, the healing that the artist receives is transferred to the audience through his story,” he says. “And in that transfer, what he has understood,

the audience also understands.”

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 14 September 2011. Photos courtesy 2point8/Delwyn Verasamy.

Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s keynote address about the arts and healing trauma took place as part of a series of talks and interventions last week called Über(w)unden (Art In Troubled Times), hosted by the Goethe Institut in Johannesburg.