MONIQUE
MBEKA PHOBA

Monique Mbeka Phoba was born in 1962 in Brussels to a father who was a diplomat from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After studying business at the Institut Saint-Luc (Brussels) and the ULB, she trained in documentary filmmaking at the Ateliers Varan in Paris, founded by Jean Rouch.

A pioneer of Belgian-African documentary filmmaking, she has created a body of work that addresses issues of identity, colonial memory, and the status of women in Africa. From 1995 to 2007, she lived in Benin, where she founded the Lagunimages documentary film festival. In 2010, she earned a master’s degree in screenwriting from the IAD (Belgium).

Her films have been broadcast on TV5, RTBF, Arte, and ZDF, and screened on three continents. She is also the author of poetry collections and short stories, and an active voice on decolonial issues in Belgium.