Ejo-Lobi Storytelling: Ritualization through Image and Movement with Petna Ndaliko Katondolo

Filmmaker, educator, and ancestral ecologist Petna Ndaliko Katondolo curates possibilities of remembering—a program of ritualization through storytelling, with films from Congo made in collaboration with the unseen and the silenced. They ask: what if the earth remembers more than we do? And what if that memory is our only chance at a future worth living?

From 10 am to 6 pm, experience these short works playing on monitors across LACMA’s Smidt Welcome Plaza as a precursor to the program. 

Starting at 6 pm, Ndaliko will introduce the program on the Smidt Welcome Plaza with a series of short films from Congolese filmmakers. Following the conversation at 8 pm, Ndaliko will introduce and screen an exclusive peek at one of his new films.

This program is the first of a two part series in connection with Imagining Black Diasporas that presents video works, in-person discussions, and somatic participations to tap into the contemporary resonances of the Black diaspora.

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Program

​​Nuit Debout (Up at Night)
Nelson Makengo, 2019, 21 minutes
Los Angeles premiere

Nocturnal Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is illuminated with thousands of cheap portable LEDs. Power lines often get cut, so at night people need to improvise solutions to light up the dark.

Three separate screens show the precarious situation in this central African country, where the population faces political upheaval and battles among violent street gangs. Sometimes the screens show the same image, sometimes different ones: a woman holding a thick cable in her hand, a lamp seller, people listening to the news on a portable radio. In the background, we hear the sound of the generator providing the precious electrical power. All these nocturnal activities are illuminated by countless tiny lights, in cute flower shapes, moving in hands, swaying in the wind.

These are visually magical scenes, but the underlying situation is harsh in this country that the author Joseph Conrad described as “the heart of darkness.” The people who live here are making a remarkable display of resilience.

Basobi
Botembe Moseka Maïté, 2024, 9 minutes
Los Angeles premiere

Bakozonga ndele, ata ko ba sila
(They will come back soon, even if they are finished)

In the soil and fields of exploitation, while our memories fade from history, our bodies never stop replaying the truth. The truth that makes us stronger over time. And becomes more imposing. If that's possible, what about everything else? We haven't lost our connection; we've just allowed ourselves to become entangled in disconnection with our soil.

At a time when Congolese people are becoming attached to a new culture, some living beings are unknowingly preserving history and passing it on from generation to generation through games, music, and dance. It is through these elements that we keep the traces of our history, our culture through time, whatever the period. Through these images Maïté creates a space for dialogue between archives, giving living ancestors their place to operate and be. Being living ancestors, by putting themselves on stage, a force is produced that awakens memory through the different parts of the body that moves collectively.

Nsala
Mickael-Sltan Mbanza, 2025, 10 minutes

Nsala plays with colonial archives and contemporary images to fictionally recount the story of a couple recruited to work in a mine under colonial rule. Rather than merely interpreting a life frozen in a colonial archival image, the film seeks to transcend the past by blending reality and imagination. Through this silent portrait, it explores the politics of colonial erasure while questioning the violent and dehumanizing economic machinery. Nsala aims to build a bridge between collective memory and personal feeling, offering a renewed perspective on buried histories.

Ndjimu (Deep Cobalt)
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, 2025, 30 minutes
Special advance screening

The third chapter in the triptych: Katasumbika / Mikuba / Ndjimu

In a future fractured by greed and greenwashed progress,
a forgotten people live hidden—
one hundred meters beneath the surface of the earth.
They call themselves The Rememberers.
Their shelter is carved in ancient stone,
where firelight dances across walls lined with Mikuba:
cobalt that once fueled empires—
now pulsing with ancestral memory.
For generations, they have dwelled in the deep,
speaking in drum codes and stone whispers,
guarding the last living ore of truth:
the cobalt that remembers.
Above, the world has moved on.
Or so it believes.

Ndjimu is not just a film—it is an invocation.

It is a descent into memory, a meditation on truth buried beneath the noise of extraction and the myth of progress. This third chapter of the triptych Katasumbika / Mikuba / Ndjimu emerges from the soil of ancestral knowing, where cobalt is not just a mineral but a sentient archive, a witness to cycles of violence, resistance, and rebirth. As a filmmaker, Katondolo walks with the rhythm of the deep—where sound, story, and stone converge. Ndjimu is an offering from that depth, made in collaboration with the unseen and the silenced. It asks: what if the earth remembers more than we do? And what if that memory is our only chance at a future worth living?

After the short films, Petna will be in conversation with Assistant Curator of Film Matazi Weathers about engaging with Black movement as an archive of stories, creating spaces curated specially for Black energy, the possibilities of remembering, and ritualization through storytelling.

Co-presented with the William Grant Still Arts Center.