In 2002, Antoine Vumilia, a political officer in the regime of Laurent
Kabila, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was sentenced to
life imprisonment for supposed involvement in Kabila's assassination.
Detained in Makala Prison, Kinshasa - considered to be the worst prison
in Africa - Antoine endured nine years of dehumanising brutality before
managing to escape.
Witness joins Antoine in Brazzaville as he waits for his claim for political
asylum in Europe to be accepted and fills in the time by returning to his first
love, theatre directing.
Including footage shot secretly inside Makala Prison, this is a
disturbing and moving portrait of what it means when your rights are stripped
away and you lose everything, including your country.
Believe it or not, this film was born in a maternity ward in Brussels. I
was waiting with my partner Marlène Rabaud, the co-maker of the film, for the
imminent birth of our first child when I received the most extraordinary text
message from DR Congo. It read: "Today is exit day. I am out." The
sender was Antoine Vumilia. After more than eight years in detention, he had
escaped from prison.
I had known Antoine for about four years at this point. Once he had
escaped, it was clear that we should make the film that told his story.
I was a Kinshasa-based correspondent for a major news organisation for
many years, and Antoine was my source in Makala Prison in Kinshasa - held to be
the worst in Africa - where he had been locked up since January 2001. Whether
it was to inform me of the transfer of suspected war criminals to the
International Criminal Court in The Hague, or to alert me to an extra-judicial
execution or a mutiny within Makala's walls, Antoine would always call me, and
would always prove reliable.
Antoine was in Makala because he was one of 85 men falsely accused of
being implicated in the assassination of President Laurent Désiré Kabila. Our
previous film Murder in Kinshasa (click here to watch the film) looked into the
assassination, and demonstrated that the men tried and found guilty had nothing
to do with the death of the president. But Antoine was the only man, of the 51
who remained in prison, to record his testimony for the film.
I hoped, after the release of Murder in Kinshasa, that public opinion and
the voices of diplomats and human rights organisations would exert sufficient
pressure to provide the release of the men still behind bars.
After all, miscarriages of justice have sometimes been reversed thanks to
the work of journalists and opinion leaders. In 1894, French army captain
Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly condemned for treason because he was Jewish, was set
free after a major campaign in the French press.
Much more recently in 1991, a handful of prisoners, close to death, were
released from the Moroccan secret detention facility in Tazmamart after a book
by French writer Gilles Perrault sparked an international outcry.
In DR Congo, however, outspoken journalists and human rights activists
are killed. Pressure to reverse gross miscarriages of justice can only come
from abroad - and so far in this case, this pressure has failed to build. So
far, also, Antoine is the only detainee from the Kabila case to have managed to
escape: 50 men remain in a living hell behind bars.
We believe Antoine's story is important because it shows the capacity of
a single individual to take his destiny into his own hands and to fight against
a system ruled by force.
Antoine's message - expressed through his writing and his theatre work -
is simple: what is important and what should be first and foremost respected,
by families or by governments, is the individual. All individuals.
He believes that this principle is a condition for the rule of law to
become entrenched across Africa. And this is what this film, Antoine: A Journey
from Hell, is about.
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