Congolese artist Sammy Baloji’s first documentary The Tree of Authenticity fuses images and sounds, and features a talking tree as its narrator, to highlight the connection between Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial past and the present-day climate crisis. RFI asked the artist what inspired him to branch out into this new medium.

Issued on: 07/12/2025 - 14:50

4 min Reading time

**RFI: What led you to making your first documentary? **

**Sammy Baloji: **In my practice I do make short films, experimental films, and I also did a few collaborative documentaries. For this project, I was doing a lot of research around the town of Yangambi [northern DRC], starting from an article in The Guardian [about trees and climate change] given to me by one of the curators of the Lubumbashi Biennial, a contemporary art platform that I co-created with a few artists in [DRC].

I was quite interested in looking at the forest and producing a [piece] of work compiling the research. And I thought that a film could be a good way, as I had already discovered all the archives related to Congolese agriculturalist Paul Panda Farnana** **and beyond.

So it was really interesting to think of a format that could help [us] to understand the complexity of human activity in the area. And I thought that film was kind of a great format for that.

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Sammy Baloji at Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

You’ve centred the story around real people – Congolese agriculturalist Paul Panda Farnana and the Belgian colonial official Abiron Beirnaert. And you also wrote powerful voices for the narration, including one for a tree, through a mix of sounds and images. How did you go about this?

By doing research, I had a lot of different examples for Farnana. There were letters written by him to his mother, colonial administrative reports on him, articles published by Belgian magazines and so on.

As for Abiron Beirnaert, he didn’t write himself, and he died while he was on a mission in [what was then the Belgian Congo]. But the story of his accident and his visit to the Congo were reported by his colleagues, who wrote about his final activities.

For the voice of the tree, the text that comes with the sound of the tree, comes from all the research done by Thomas Hendricks, who’s an anthropologist who was interested in understanding international activities within the Congolese forest.

I work a lot with installations, and I have this approach to combine different sources and different elements such as sound archives, photographs or excerpts from films. And then there’s the soundscape, which I did with two sound artists. The idea was to create this kind of immersive soundscape... an immersive experience bringing together images, sounds and voices.

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Would you say the film is a work of activism?

I’m from a country – but also a province – that has been under extractivism since the end of the 19th century, for its mineral resources. This is the first time I’ve been able to provide information about how the climate has been a subject of colonial control, even the forest.

The place that I’m from is the place that served as an extraction site for uranium that was used for the atomic bomb. And there’s lithium there, which is really important for green energy.

But there’s a continuous injustice in the ignoring of the people impacted by the extraction of these different raw materials, that serve the international economy.

I don’t just address this with the film, it’s also why we created the Lubumbashi Biennial, to bring attention to what is happening within the country from Congolese perspectives and local voices.

I wanted to look at it from a very long perspective, starting from the colonial presence in DRC, and looking at the way that all these processes are connected. It’s not coming from a place of anger – I tried to go beyond this binary way of thinking, between north and south, looking at the environment, at nature and at the relationship we have with the Earth.

This is why the tree appears. For me, it’s really about local knowledge: the tree has been in that forest for more than three centuries.

The question I’m raising is how do we rethink our connection with the environment?

The film was shown at Film Africa in London and can be viewed on the Franco-German channel Arte. Do you have plans to show it in Africa?

It’s already been shown in South Africa at a festival, and we are thinking of having it shown in Kinshasa. And of course, the next edition of the Lubumbashi Biennial will show it next year. I can’t wait to have this moment on the continent where I can present it.

This interview has been edited for clarity.