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The Wrestlers (1982)

The Wrestlers poster
Original title
M'Pongo
Directed by
Jean-Michel Tchissoukou
Genre
sport film
Country
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Runtime
1h 17m
Rating
5.2 of 10 from 4 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb

How it feels

This film is both a documentary and a fictional story about a traditional Congolese wrestling festival. The competition between two villages stands in for the larger clash between African and European ways of life in the 1980s.

observationalgroundedtraditionalculturalatmosphericearthymatter-of-fact

What happens

M'Pongo est un film congolais réalisé par Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, sorti en 1982. Le M'Pongo est une lutte traditionnelle congolaise qui a encore, de nos jours, une très grande popularité. En 1982, le réalisateur Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, le père du cinéma congolais, met en parallèle les conflits créés autour d'un festival de M'Pongo entre deux villages au conflit de civilisations africaines et européennes explosif à l'époque. Le film est davantage un documentaire sur ce sport et l'éclat des coutumes africaines de l'époque qu'une fiction. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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