By Niccolo Bechtler
In his latest short documentary, FANDANGO: Portrait of an Opera Workshop, Belgian filmmaker Manno Lanssens captures an intimate portrait of the talent and perseverance of five Congolese opera singers. Lanssens said he hopes the film will help Congolese singers gain support and mentorship enjoyed by their peers in more developed countries.
The seed of the idea for the short film, which covers a six-day opera workshop for five singers in Kinshasa, came to Lanssens while traveling through Africa for a previous project, he said in a video interview. Encountering opera singers in African churches, Lanssens said he was surprised by the beauty of their voices.
“I was always wondering, wow, what could have they become if they had the same possibilities as we in the West,” he said.
When he read an article about opera singers in The Democratic Republic of Congo, the seed took root. For Lanssens, a regular attendee at La Monnaie opera house in his home city of Brussels, the subject was a natural fit.
There was also the thorny issue of Congo and Belgium’s painful intertwined history, which captured his imagination. Congo, which was subject to Belgian colonial rule for nearly sixty years before gaining hard-fought independence in 1960, was now producing performers of a classically European art form: opera.
“I was intrigued,” Lanssens said. “I’m Belgian, so we have this—I wouldn’t say ‘complex’ relationship—but there is still a relationship between Belgium, especially Brussels, and Congo.”
Lanssens flew to Kinshasa to attend a vocal competition in December 2021. There he met most of the singers who would go on to appear in the short documentary, including contralto Dorcas Nende, who told Lanssens about an upcoming opera workshop in Kinshasa with American soprano and teaching artist Joy Bechtler. Bechtler, Nende said, was looking for someone to document the workshop. After a virtual meeting with Bechtler, Lanssens agreed to take on the project, intending to treat it as research for a larger, feature-length documentary.
“I didn’t know her,” Lanssens said, “so I figured that was a good way to get to know each other.”
Lanssens often spoke of his documentary subjects in such personal terms, emphasizing the importance of building close relationships with the people he portrays. For Lanssens, one mark of a successful documentary is the degree to which its subjects are able to forget that it’s being recorded at all, behaving naturally. Lanssens found special gratification in capturing the singers’ rehearsals, where they lost themselves in their craft.
“As a documentary maker, I could really show them, how they rehearse and how they are and their reactions, and I really like that,” Lanssens said. “I come closer to them.”
This concern with portraying reality was another recurring theme in discussing Lanssens’s creative process. He chose to shoot the opera workshop with minimal equipment—simple lights and a small camera and microphone—because, he explained, this short documentary was originally intended simply as research for a feature-length project and did not require a larger crew. However, his agile recording setup proved a boon for capturing the singers as they truly are.
“The advantage was that I was on my own, and I could really, completely, focus on the singers,” Lanssens said. “For documentary, the smaller the crew, the better it is, because you can get more intimate with the characters.”
In the same breath, however, Lanssens described how he might have shot the film with a larger crew and a longer production time.
“I would have liked to film more of the city, the singers’ homes, things like that,” he said.
Kinshasa can be hostile to filmmakers, and shooting in public requires careful preparation. Muggings are common, and documentarians can find themselves imprisoned for failing to arrange the right permits. Without a full team behind him, Lanssens’s creative scope was limited.
To Lanssens, these omissions distort reality and could give the wrong idea about Kinshasa or the singers who rehearse and perform in—and despite—it.
“Now we just have an impression that it looks all beautiful,” he said. “In reality, it’s not like that.”
As a filmmaker, Lanssens looks to the past and future simultaneously. One eye is trained on finished projects, assessing their successes, failures, and potential to inspire action. The other eye is focused on the next project, more ambitious than the last. In conversation, he seemed proud of FANDANGO’s achievements, if not satisfied with its scope.
“The main thing would be to set up a real chamber opera, that they could do it completely in front of an audience,” Lanssens said. “I would like to make a feature documentary out of that. We hope that’s the next step.”
As for FANDANGO, Lanssens said he hopes it can contribute to raising awareness for singers in Kinshasa and help them gain support and access to resources that could help them realize their potential.
“It makes your heart bleed to see all the talent and to know that it’s very difficult for them to progress,” Lanssens said. “I hope the film can make this happen for them.”