A phone can make a person present in two places and absent from both. Baloji's short film Zombies takes that familiar experience into the streets, salons and clubs of Kinshasa. Its figures look at screens, carry devices and appear in costumes assembled from a city that is already full of discarded technology. The future in the film does not arrive from a distant spaceship. It grows from objects held in a hand and from the social habits that have formed around them.
The film’s press dossier describes a passage between hope and dystopia. A hair salon, futuristic clubbing and a campaign parade for a fictional dictator appear in its synopsis. The film takes mobile technology seriously as a force that changes how people look at one another, while its costumes and staging refuse to make Kinshasa a passive backdrop. Baloji directs, writes and performs across music, cinema and design. He was born in Lubumbashi and raised in Belgium, as the Cannes press kit for his later feature and interviews recount. His work moves between the European and Congolese worlds without pretending that either can speak for the other.
The visual language of Zombies has been read as Afrofuturist, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam identifies its mixture of contemporary technology and future-facing references. Such a term is most useful when it brings the film's construction into focus. Baloji imagines what a connected city looks like when connection does not necessarily create closeness. His art asks who can use spectacle, who is captured by it and what a person might make from its discarded materials.
The city looks back
Zombies premiered in 2019 as a short music film. In the film’s press dossier, Baloji describes a nearly bodily relation to the phone: the device becomes an extension of the hand and offers a sense of being in several places at once. This is an image of power with a cost. A person can transmit themselves across distance, yet a screen can also keep their attention locked away from those beside them. Baloji turns that contradiction into a moving city portrait.
The route through salons, clubs and streets matters. These are spaces where looks are made and displayed in public. A hair salon is a place of labour, conversation and visual invention. A club organises bodies through music, darkness and proximity. A political parade asks a crowd to become evidence of a leader's authority. By moving among such settings, Zombies makes the phone one device in a larger system of performance. It does not simply warn that technology is bad for its users. It asks how a city already skilled at making appearances meets another machine for circulating them.
The film also uses a fictional figure of political power. Its press synopsis calls him a dictator in campaign. His parade belongs to the same field of images as a social feed: people are asked to look, repeat and distribute a performance of command. A clubgoer with a phone and a politician seeking an audience occupy very different positions, but each depends on attention. Baloji cuts their worlds together so that the act of watching becomes part of the story rather than a neutral position outside it.
Costume gives the film another means of speaking. A Siskel Film Center account describes collaborations with queer performers and street artists, with garments made using bottle caps and electronic waste. These materials carry a history before they become fashion: consumption, disposal and the uneven global movement of technology. On a body, they can be playful, proud and difficult to ignore. The transformation does not erase the waste problem. It makes visible the labour of reworking what others have left behind.
The film’s press dossier credits cinematographer Joachim Philippe and Baloji’s music. A Dazed interview credits Baloji with writing, art direction and styling, and records his account of the dancers’ costumes. Those decisions matter to what is on screen. A film that examines images and the politics of their circulation has been built by several people making decisions about how a body enters a frame. The street performer is not an anonymous element in a filmmaker's design. Kinshasa's artists contribute to the film's visual intelligence.
The Rotterdam festival description calls the film humorous as well as overtly stylised. Humour prevents its crowded imagery from settling into a solemn thesis about technological decline. A device may be almost fused to a hand, but the exaggerated situations leave room for viewers to recognise their own habits and laugh at their oddness. Satire is useful here because the film's objects are so ordinary. Its futures are not far away; they are the present made strange enough to see again.
A television studio made for power
Before Zombies, Baloji made Kaniama Show, a fiction built around a propaganda television programme. The short demonstrates a separate interest in how images acquire authority. A government-friendly screen can present a planned performance as spontaneous public feeling. The medium's familiar forms, including presenters, music and spectacle, help an invented political story look like something an audience might already know how to watch.
The film’s producer describes Kaniama Show as a satire of state television and its soft-power propaganda. That description points to the work's method without requiring every scene to be read as documentary evidence about a particular government. Baloji constructs the style of persuasion rather than merely announcing that persuasion exists. A viewer can recognise how an arranged set, a performer and a repeated message might make power seem natural.
The shift from a television set to the roaming phones of Zombies maps a change in distribution. In one work, spectacle is concentrated in a broadcast that asks people to receive it. In the other, countless devices let images circulate through individual hands. Neither system is innocent. Both can invite invention, but both can also extend someone else's control over what is visible. Baloji's camera moves between them because his concern is not a single machine. It is the social world that gives the machine a role.
Music travels through these works as more than a soundtrack. In a conversation with Contemporary And, Baloji traces a path from music through graffiti, calligraphy and graphic design to making costumes for his first feature film. A song can establish a point of view, but a film can make that view visible through locations, bodies and cuts between scenes. His filmmaking draws on those earlier forms instead of abandoning them.
That movement between forms is especially clear in his images of Kinshasa. A beat sets time; a costume establishes a figure's relation to a street; the camera decides when a screen fills the frame and when the viewer sees the person holding it. Those decisions make a political argument without stopping the work to deliver one. The future appears as a montage of actions people are already taking, intensified by rhythm and design.
Four lives under a name
Baloji's 2023 feature Augure, released in English as Omen, leaves the phone-centred satire for another system of seeing: the accusation that someone is a witch or sorcerer. The Cannes synopsis introduces four people living under such labels. A person can be defined by a family, a neighbour or a community before they have been allowed to speak. The film gives several accused figures their own chapters and ways of responding.
In the Cannes director interview, Baloji says he wanted more than one protagonist because the burden of an accusation changes with gender and age. Koffi, who returns to Congo from Europe, responds differently from the young Paco; Tshala and the older Mujila face conditions shaped by the control of women's bodies. The four-part structure refuses the comfort of making one man's return stand for everyone else's story. What first appears to be his journey becomes a larger inquiry into the people around him.
Koffi bears a port-wine stain on his face. Baloji says he gave the character that mark to visualise the weight of a label. It makes a social judgment visible on a body without making the mark itself the cause of the judgment. Paco, a child accused of witchcraft, approaches his assigned identity differently. In the director's account, Paco uses tricks and fear, finding a kind of agency in what others project onto him. Their responses are not equivalent, and the film's division into chapters allows that difference to remain.
The film's magical realism joins these social facts to an imaginative register. In the Cannes press kit, Baloji speaks about his own name, which has been associated with the sorcerer. He says he later learned of an older, positive sense linked to a “man of science,” and of a change in meaning during colonialism. A name that he has had to carry and reinterpret becomes material for cinema.
Augure makes reality and imagination difficult to separate. In an interview with RTBF, Baloji explains that no character wakes from a dream to settle what was real. Dream and lived experience remain porous. That choice is different from presenting Congolese life as inherently magical. The film follows people subjected to tangible judgments, then lets cinema expose how much social reality depends on stories that others insist are true.
Baloji prepared music from the viewpoints of his four characters before shooting. In a first-person interview with TheWrap, he says the songs did not ultimately fit into the film as planned, but he shared them with the actors as a way of developing emotion and rhythm. The discarded soundtrack was still part of the making. It helped performers imagine inner lives before the camera arrived. Film production here resembles his larger practice: one medium creates material that another can use even if the original plan changes.
The work's costumes and visual design also extend the characters' interior worlds. Baloji has worked in fashion and designed for moving images, yet Augure does not treat dress as a separate decorative layer. A costume participates in how a person becomes visible and how others classify them. After Zombies, where waste materials help make futuristic urban figures, the feature attends to the politics of a more intimate gaze. What does a family think it knows when it sees a face, a dress or a body returning from abroad?
The trap in the return story
Baloji has resisted describing Augure as a simple homecoming narrative. In a Belgian RTBF interview, he calls the return-to-Congo frame a false lead. Koffi has lived in Europe and has the ability to cross borders; other characters do not share those privileges. A film that stayed only with his point of view could make the people he meets into material for his self-discovery. The four-chapter form redistributes attention.
That choice connects to Baloji's own experience of moving between Congo and Belgium, while preventing autobiography from becoming the film's sole explanation. In a conversation with Contemporary And, he discusses a diasporic imagination shaped by the gaps between places and their stories. Such gaps can produce disappointment as well as invention. Someone who has been absent may remember a country that does not match the one encountered on return. Cinema can hold that dissonance without appointing one viewpoint as the truth of the whole place.
The four accused figures also show how a society makes outsiders through ordinary acts of naming. A child, an older woman, a young woman and a man returning from elsewhere may all be called sorcerers, but the accusation does different work in each life. Baloji's film gives its title, Omen, an unstable force. A sign is something a person reads in advance of an event. The danger is that people may treat their reading as certainty and make another person's life conform to it. The characters' futures depend partly on resisting that closed interpretation.
His films repeatedly ask who controls a reading. Kaniama Show satirises the broadcast that packages political authority. Zombies sends spectators through a city where phones, costumes and campaigns compete for their gaze. Augure examines the inherited stories that assign a person a destiny. The forms are distinct: propaganda fiction, music film and four-part feature. Their common energy comes from Baloji's skill at making the machinery of an image visible while still letting an audience feel its attraction.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams editorial brought together Stockholm creatives with ties to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its futuristic fashion images and conversations about the country's possible futures offer a different way to think about who gets to picture Congo. Baloji's cinema joins that wider field at a particular angle. It places the viewer before a screen and asks what forms of power have already entered the act of looking. The people in his films can answer with costume, performance, wit, music or a refusal to live inside a name assigned by someone else.
In Zombies, a phone extends the hand. In Augure, an accusation reaches into a life. Both can feel inescapably attached to a person. Baloji's art does not pretend that one dazzling image can cut either connection. It makes images and sounds that expose their construction, letting a viewer see the space where another interpretation might begin. That space is the future his work keeps opening.