Kinshasa Symphony depicts, movingly, the sacrifices that people are willing to make just to ennoble their lives with music. In a city of rusted-out cars bouncing over potholes, of hand-lettered signs on sagging storefronts, and of apartments that make your garage look like a hotel suite, the world’s only all-black orchestra and chorus is determined to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But members of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste have to hand-build musical instruments whose names they scarcely know, and one of the violists is always leaving rehearsal to keep the generator running. Yet after all the sweaty, short-tempered rehearsals and glares from dubious onlookers, when the big concert finally arrives, the crowd is huge — and Kinshasa’s amateur musicians. unexpectedly, turn out to have been practicing more than just the Beethoven. When privileged Europeans and North Americans undergo privations like these just for an opportunity to reproduce Congolese music on Congolese instruments, then we will have achieved the unity of humankind that Beethoven’s Ninth envisions. (The Spokane Symphony’s Eckart Preu will introduce the Friday screening.) (Germany/Congo | 95 mins) Read our story about this