A DATE WITH OSCAR
We break down the nominee list and meet Montrealers with vested interests in who walks to the podium and down the red carpet on Sunday.
PLUS: Our writers offer their Oscar picks, Bill Brownstein on translating/subtitling star Robert Gray, Brendan Kelly on Rebelle actor Alain Bastien
Alain Bastien says his Lingala is pretty good. That’s the language spoken in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the dialogue in Montreal writer-director Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle (War Witch) is in Lingala.
“I can understand it,” Bastien said in an interview at a downtown café this week. “If people talk, I know what they’re talking about.”
Nguyen and much of the cast and crew of Rebelle — including Montreal actor Bastien — will be in Los Angeles Sunday for the Academy Awards, where their movie is one of five nominees for best foreign-language film.
Rebelle was shot in Congo and is set in an unnamed African country that is clearly modelled on the war-torn nation. The two leads in the film are first-time actors from the Congo: Rachel Mwanza, who plays Komona, the young girl forced by vicious rebels to murder her parents and become a child soldier, and Serge Kanyinda, who plays the Magician, an albino boy who becomes fast friends with her. Mwanza won the best-actress prize for her big-screen debut at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, where the Quebec film had its world première in official competition.
The thing about Rebelle is that you wouldn’t know it’s a Quebec production unless you look closely at the credits — it’s set entirely in Africa, the story couldn’t be farther removed from Quebec reality and most of the actors are African. There are, however, three Montreal actors in key supporting roles, including Bastien as a rebel commander; Ralph Prosper as the Magician’s uncle, a butcher, who helps the two kids out when they’re on the run; and Mizinga Mwinga as Grand Tigre Royal, the head of the rebel forces, who decides that Komona is a “war witch” and has magical powers — a conclusion he arrives at after he learns she is able to see grey ghosts in the trees, tipping them off that enemy forces are nearby.
Bastien says that since he can get by in Lingala, some in Congo actually believed he was Congolese, which is not the case. He was born in Montreal to Haitian parents and grew up between here and Atlanta, Ga., where his parents now live. So he was already perfectly fluent in French, English and Creole before he took up the challenge of Lingala.
Once he snared the role in Rebelle, he spent three weeks working 9 to 5 with a Congolese teacher here. By the time he touched down in Kinshasa, he already had a good base of knowledge. But there was one problem when he got there in the summer of 2011.
“The guy (in Montreal) was a teacher and the Lingala he was teaching me was too proper,” Bastien said. “The people I was dealing with were like, ‘Hmmm. You know what the problem is? Your Lingala is too perfect. You’re in the jungle, fighting the government for so many years, and you sound like you went to university.’ So that’s when I went to another teacher there, and he showed me how to break down the language. My biggest challenge was to be as credible as possible.”
He lived through some pretty wild experiences filming in Congo. There was a scary moment on the first day of shooting, when they were filming a sequence with the rebels fighting government forces.
“I saw the (assistant director) running, saying, ‘Stop shooting, get down,’ ” Bastien said. “And I’m thinking he means, ‘Go down and shoot,’ and so I go down and start shooting, and I see his face going red, and he’s saying, ‘No, no, no — stop shooting.’ So I give the sign to the rebels to stop shooting. We had to lay down on the ground and then I saw a pile of dust. Then you heard some engines coming towards us, and when the dust dissipated, you go: ‘Huh, is that a rocket launcher?’ We saw at least 12 to 15 cars coming towards us, with rocket launchers, AK-47s. I’m like, ‘This is not part of the movie.’ They were guys from the army and they came to shut us down. We said we told the minister of culture and they said, ‘Well, we didn’t get the message.’ They thought we were rebels. We were dressed like rebels. We were shooting a couple of miles from the presidential palace. So from that day, we had two army guys protecting us.”
Bastien starred i n only one movie before Rebelle: the gritty gangland drama Sortie 67, which is set in St-Michel. So he’s well aware of just how important it is for his acting career to have a memorable role in an Oscar-nominated movie — a movie that also won two awards at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, for best narrative feature and best actress (Mwanza). Bastien now has an agent in Vancouver looking for English projects for him, and he’s in L.A. right now meeting with folks in the industry.
“Now you have a title. Now you’re in the Oscars — you’re an Oscar nominee. It changes your status. Other producers get a bit more respect for your craft.”
But he’s not 100 per cent sure he’ll be in the Dolby Theatre Sunday night for the most exclusive event in the movie biz.
“The thing is, it’s pretty tight right now. So everybody’s going to be there. So we’re going to be in the vicinity. We just got the news that Rachel got her visa from the Congo, so she’s coming. But the Academy is trying to get me there. So we’ll see what happens.”