Before the Oscars air on ABC this Sunday (we can only hope it is the last award show recorded during this pandemic), check out our guide to this year’s nominees and where to stream them and/or watch them in theaters. Otherwise, read on for other new options worth adding to your list, like the SIFF entry Downstream to Kinshasa, a SPLIFF watch party with The Stranger‘s Chase Burns and Jasmyne Keimig, and the opening weekend of Mortal Kombat on HBO and in select theaters. See them all below, and find even more options on our on-demand calendar or our guide to other streaming events this week.
Newly Streaming: Local Connection
Downstream to Kinshasa
Here is a war you probably never heard about. The belligerents: the Black African states of Uganda and Rwanda. The horror lasted for six days in 2000, erupted around the Congolese city of Kisangani, and ended with around 1500 lifeless bodies and 3000 wounded bodies. The film Downstream to Kinshasa, directed by Dieudo Hamadi, is about a few men and women who are members of the latter group. They lost limbs, property, and peace of mind in the war, which is now mostly forgotten. All they want, at this point, 20 years after the conflict, is compensation from the government and recognition of the catastrophe. Hamadi’s camera is like a spaceship that constantly explores, probes, reveals the new worlds of blackness. There is black skin with the sheen of sweat, black skin exposed to little or no light, black skin outside and under the bright sun. Black skin is actually deep. It has many layers, like the surface of a deep body of water. And there are times when it has a beauty, which has been ignored for most of cinema’s 100-year history, that’s preternatural. We now live in an age that has black skin finally coming alive like never before. CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF
Starting Friday
