Ngangura Mweze was trained in cinema in Belgium, taught film at the National Institute for Arts in Kinshasa, and was chief of the audio-visual section of the National Museum of Zaire. Not a marginal cinema, I hope. This is the first African feature a public has gone to the trouble of paying the same money for that they would have for a Rambo, or a kung fu film. Most African films are shown at cultural centers, practically free. Cinema is a language that does not exist in traditional African culture.
Cinema is an urban art.
The griot in one part of Africa is not the same as in another part of Africa. The public to whom one addresses oneself may not know what a griot is. In Kinshasa, they don't exist. Television's potential to foster indigenous cultural expression is limited by the fact that it receives low-cost product from international sources, particularly European. La Vie Est Belle is significant because it demonstrates a different side of African cinema from the sober, often didactic films probing social, economic and political realities of newly independent nations.