AUGURE
Musician, Filmmaker & Multitalented artist Baloji's debut feature film is a cinematic odyssey on feminism and sorcery in Congolese homecoming
Baloji charts a creative path that rises from the ashes of his early life as a rapper. Born in Lubumbashi in 1978, he moved to Belgium at age four, severing ties with his mother and homeland. As a teenager, he channeled feelings of estrangement into rap and dance, eventually co-founding the pioneering Belgian hip-hop group Starflam. His solo career began in 2006, sparked by the discovery of a long-lost letter from his mother. In 2008, he released Hotel Impala, a delicate, autobiographical album that garnered critical acclaim. Always attuned to the visual dimension of his work, Baloji directed his own music videos and gradually moved into filmmaking. Despite facing skepticism and barriers−from the perception of rappers as “less esteemed” artists to repeated funding rejections, including from the Flemish Audiovisual Fund−he persisted. His early shorts, Peau de Chagrin/Bleu de Nuit (2018) and Zombies (2019), self-financed in collaboration with CATPC and Congo Astronauts, laid the groundwork for his ambitious debut feature Augure (2023).
Augure mirrors Baloji’s own journey, exploring the legacies of marginalization, identity, and cultural inheritance. The story opens with Koffi, a man returning to Congo to introduce his pregnant white wife. Expelled as a child because his birthmark was believed to signify zabolo, or the devil, Koffi’s story echoes Baloji’s own reclamation of his surname, which carries the stigma of “sorcerer” in Swahili. Koffi is just one of four central characters: Tshala and Mama Mujila, his sister and mother, navigate the constraints of a patriarchal world, while Paco, a shegue, orchestrates a ritualistic funeral for his deceased sister, enlisting his crew in pink princess dresses. Augure immerses viewers in these lives, dissolving conventional narrative boundaries into a sensory, emotional, and spiritual journey. The film unfolds in a surreal, unnamed space that fuses Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, the D.R. Congo’s cultural and economic hubs. Kinshasa’s dense, Lingala-speaking streets and Lubumbashi’s desolate mining landscapes converge seamlessly, reflecting both colonial and postcolonial legacies. Mining emerges as a dystopian motif: a ceaseless quest for wealth that eludes ordinary Congolese. Koffi’s father, lost to the mines, becomes a spectral presence, emblematic of absent patriarchal authority and systemic erasure.
Baloji’s practice is defined by an unflinching ability to choreograph disparate cultural codes into a singular visual language. His work resists classification, moving fluidly between references that span geographies and belief systems: ceremonial dress echoing the lineage of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, fragments of European folklore, Mobutist symbolism rendered in leopard skin, and improvised monuments such as a glowing tree assembled from phone-charging cables in a country where electricity remains unstable. These elements are not deployed as quotation but as material−reassembled into a dense, hallucinatory logic that forms Baloji’s unmistakable aesthetic grammar. Across the film, the four central figures are bound by a shared struggle against inherited roles and imposed identities. Their attempts at release unfold within a series of charged, phantasmagorical tableaux that sharpen the emotional stakes of the narrative. Each character appears suspended between expectation and impossibility, haunted by the absence of resolution and the weight of unrealized selves. Baloji mirrors this tension in his filmmaking, constructing a space where meaning remains deliberately open−inviting the viewer to confront their own uncertainties within the film’s shifting moral and symbolic terrain.
Film Stills by Kristin Lee Moolman
Musician, Filmmaker & Multitalented artist Baloji's debut feature film is a cinematic odyssey on feminism and sorcery in Congolese homecoming
Baloji charts a creative path that rises from the ashes of his early life as a rapper. Born in Lubumbashi in 1978, he moved to Belgium at age four, severing ties with his mother and homeland. As a teenager, he channeled feelings of estrangement into rap and dance, eventually co-founding the pioneering Belgian hip-hop group Starflam. His solo career began in 2006, sparked by the discovery of a long-lost letter from his mother. In 2008, he released Hotel Impala, a delicate, autobiographical album that garnered critical acclaim. Always attuned to the visual dimension of his work, Baloji directed his own music videos and gradually moved into filmmaking. Despite facing skepticism and barriers−from the perception of rappers as “less esteemed” artists to repeated funding rejections, including from the Flemish Audiovisual Fund−he persisted. His early shorts, Peau de Chagrin/Bleu de Nuit (2018) and Zombies (2019), self-financed in collaboration with CATPC and Congo Astronauts, laid the groundwork for his ambitious debut feature Augure (2023).
Augure mirrors Baloji’s own journey, exploring the legacies of marginalization, identity, and cultural inheritance. The story opens with Koffi, a man returning to Congo to introduce his pregnant white wife. Expelled as a child because his birthmark was believed to signify zabolo, or the devil, Koffi’s story echoes Baloji’s own reclamation of his surname, which carries the stigma of “sorcerer” in Swahili. Koffi is just one of four central characters: Tshala and Mama Mujila, his sister and mother, navigate the constraints of a patriarchal world, while Paco, a shegue, orchestrates a ritualistic funeral for his deceased sister, enlisting his crew in pink princess dresses. Augure immerses viewers in these lives, dissolving conventional narrative boundaries into a sensory, emotional, and spiritual journey. The film unfolds in a surreal, unnamed space that fuses Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, the D.R. Congo’s cultural and economic hubs. Kinshasa’s dense, Lingala-speaking streets and Lubumbashi’s desolate mining landscapes converge seamlessly, reflecting both colonial and postcolonial legacies. Mining emerges as a dystopian motif: a ceaseless quest for wealth that eludes ordinary Congolese. Koffi’s father, lost to the mines, becomes a spectral presence, emblematic of absent patriarchal authority and systemic erasure.
Baloji’s practice is defined by an unflinching ability to choreograph disparate cultural codes into a singular visual language. His work resists classification, moving fluidly between references that span geographies and belief systems: ceremonial dress echoing the lineage of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, fragments of European folklore, Mobutist symbolism rendered in leopard skin, and improvised monuments such as a glowing tree assembled from phone-charging cables in a country where electricity remains unstable. These elements are not deployed as quotation but as material−reassembled into a dense, hallucinatory logic that forms Baloji’s unmistakable aesthetic grammar. Across the film, the four central figures are bound by a shared struggle against inherited roles and imposed identities. Their attempts at release unfold within a series of charged, phantasmagorical tableaux that sharpen the emotional stakes of the narrative. Each character appears suspended between expectation and impossibility, haunted by the absence of resolution and the weight of unrealized selves. Baloji mirrors this tension in his filmmaking, constructing a space where meaning remains deliberately open−inviting the viewer to confront their own uncertainties within the film’s shifting moral and symbolic terrain.
Film Stills by Kristin Lee Moolman