UGURUMASH 

UGURUMASH is a documentary film produced by Kumbukumbu and Twentynine Studios.

The film is currently in production.

Ugurumash (“The Great Fire”) is an sonic transmission by the witnesses, participants and descendants of the colonial occupation of the North-East of Congo (1885-1960).

The title, Ugurumash, means “The Great Fire” in Alur language - one of the many languages of the North-East of DR Congo.

It is a term, a metaphor, used by Alur to refer to the colonial era and points to its apocalyptic, long-lasting consequences.

It is a documentary film that is part of Kumbukumbu, a Belgo-Congolese oral history project founded in Ituri, DR Congo, 2021, by artists Koenraad Ecker and Haldi Okudheyo.
The film seeks to give answers to the question : what is colonisation?

Our strategy is to exclusively use primary sources.

The foundation for this film is a collection of sound recordings, recorded in the North-East of Congo between 1908 and 1954.

Most of these songs have been translated for the first time by the Kumbukumbu project, re-igniting the extraordinary power of their messages of resistance.

These songs are combined with the local oral histories of the singers’ descendants and re-recorded reports of colonial administrators.

Using sonic alchemy, these disparate voices are brought together onto the same stage: conjuring a night-time tribunal of ghostly witnesses, their outlines lit by the fire.