We, Students! (2022)
The University of Bangui sits at something of a crossroads. Founded in 1970 and long regarded as the intellectual heart of the Central African Republic, it has spent much of the past two decades operating under extraordinary pressure: chronic underfunding, the displacement caused by recurring armed conflict across the country, and a student population that keeps growing while the infrastructure around it does not. It is the kind of institution that represents hope almost by definition, because in a country that has endured coups, civil war, and what the United Nations has repeatedly described as one of the world's most neglected humanitarian crises, a university degree still carries enormous symbolic weight. That tension, between aspiration and grim material reality, is precisely the territory that We, Students! chooses to occupy. The film arrived on the festival circuit in 2022 and earned a modest but warm reception, partly because films from the Central African Republic are genuinely rare, and partly because it finds something universal in a situation that most Western audiences will never have experienced firsthand. If you have enjoyed other documentaries that take an honest look at African urban life, Macca's reviews of Sunday in Brazzaville and City of Joy offer useful companion reading.
Behind the camera is Rafiki Fariala, who is not merely the director here but also one of the four named subjects. That dual role places the film somewhere between observational documentary and personal essay, and it is a choice that carries both obvious advantages and a few complications worth keeping in mind. Fariala trained in filmmaking and has spent his career working in and around Central African cinema at a time when that national cinema barely exists as a commercial or industrial entity. The production is a co-venture between Makongo Films, Kiripi Films, and the French outfit UNITÉ, a financing model that is entirely typical for francophone African documentaries of this type, where local creative vision tends to depend on European co-production money to reach an international audience at all. The budget was modest by any measure, and the film wears that modestly rather than apologising for it: the cinematography is handheld and close, functional rather than showy, which suits the material. There is no narrator, no talking-head interviews in the conventional sense, and no archival footage. Fariala keeps the camera trained on the present tense, on lecture halls, street corners, and the small economies his subjects have built around themselves in order simply to keep attending.
The four principal figures are economics undergraduates: Nestor Ngbandi Ngouyou, Aaron Koyasukpengo, Benjamin Kongbo Sombot, and Fariala himself. None of them are professional actors, which is obvious and also entirely the point. What they bring is a kind of unguarded candour that staged performance rarely produces, an openness about their ambitions and frustrations that makes the film feel more like spending time with real people than sitting through a constructed argument. Economics as a subject choice is itself worth noting, because each of them frames their studies in terms of national reconstruction, not personal enrichment. That idealism, measured against the daily realities the camera records around them, gives the film most of its emotional texture. The documentary is 83 minutes long, which for this kind of intimate, observational work sits somewhere between lean and slightly overstretched, depending on your patience for a pace that is deliberately unhurried. It is the sort of film that rewards a certain generosity from its audience, a willingness to simply watch and listen without waiting for a dramatic turn.
We, Students!, is a 2022 documentary from the Central African Republic directed by Rafiki Fariala. The film follows three economics students 9Georges, Moïse, and Ernest) as they navigate their university studies in Bangui, harbouring grand visions of building a brighter, more prosperous future for their country. On a human level, it’s a genuinely touching and inspiring watch. Fariala captures the raw ambition and quiet resilience of these young men beautifully, making you root for them as they try to make sense of a world that seems determined to hold them back.
But what starts as an uplifting portrait of youth quickly morphs into something of a quiet expose. While the students are deeply engaged and hopeful, the film inadvertently highlights just how massively out of their depth their professors are. Instead of receiving rigorous, economically sound teachings that might actually help them rebuild their nation's infrastructure, the lecturers are caught on camera spouting empty buzzwords and offering vague, unhelpful platitudes. It’s a frustrating dynamic to watch, painting a rather bleak picture of an educational system that is failing the very people it’s supposed to empower.
Because of this frustrating academic stagnation, the documentary does drag its feet a bit in the middle. While the emotional core of the students' journey keeps you invested, the repetitive nature of their lectures and the lack of narrative momentum mean it could have easily been trimmed down by ten or fifteen minutes without losing its impact. Still, it remains a solid, well-made piece of cinema. We, Students! is a touching, inspiring look at the next generation of the Central African Republic, even if it doubles as a rather damning indictment of the university system meant to guide them.
We, Students! sits comfortably alongside a broader wave of documentary work emerging from francophone Africa and its diaspora, films that are interested less in crisis as spectacle and more in the texture of ordinary life within systems that are failing ordinary people. Fariala's instinct to put himself inside the frame rather than behind it entirely gives the film an honesty that a more conventionally distanced approach might have smoothed away. It is a polished but unremarkable piece of filmmaking in technical terms, and at 83 minutes it is not quite as tight as it could be, but those are fairly minor complaints about a film doing something genuinely worthwhile. For anyone curious about how documentary can function as both personal record and quiet social document, it makes a good double bill with All Are Human. The students in this film dream of rebuilding a country. Whether that is optimism or stubbornness is probably a matter of where you are sitting when you watch it.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-06-12
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