Private Project

LABADI - sound of a neighborhood

LABADI - sound of a neighborhood
a film by Jakob Gengenbach

A rooster crows, the muezzin calls, drums and melodies from afar,
humans speaking in tongues, voices of children and teachers in the schoolyard,
a young band playing fervently - sounds and noises,
which cannot always be assigned to a source.

The film „LABADI - sound of a neighborhood“ documents different people living in the Labadi neighborhood of Accra. This neighborhood of Ghana's capital is characterized by a variety of sounds and noises.
A day's journey, in just under 30 minutes.
The lives of the local people are made audible and visible through this film, through fixed image settings and without further comments. This allows the viewer to concentrate entirely on their own hearing and vision - and thus gets an insight into the diversity of the district.

  • Jakob Gengenbach
    Director
  • Jakob Gengenbach
    Writer
  • Jakob Gengenbach
    Producer
  • Patrick Verhamme
    Graphic Design
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    28 minutes 48 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 26, 2022
  • Production Budget:
    7,500 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Ghana
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Jakob Gengenbach

Jakob Gengenbach was born in 1991 and lives and works in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and Accra (Ghana - West Africa).

In Frankfurt he first studied music at the University of Music and Performing Arts with a focus on drums.
In 2013 he moved to the Institute for Music and Media at the Robert Schumann Music Academy in Düsseldorf, where he completed his studies in 2018. In 2015 he lived in Barcelona for a year and studied Audiovisual Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona.

In addition to continuing his musical education, he focused on moving images during his studies and later also professionally and has since realized various projects in the artistic and documentary fields.

He is fascinated by the interaction and counterplay of image and sound and the challenge of finding ways to experience music visually in a new or different way and to sharpen the senses for the image and especially for the sound in film.
Jakob Gengenbach's goal is to show that the coexistence of both media has a greater influence on each other than we usually realize.
It is therefore not surprising that he repeatedly makes documentary, experimental and musical films that deal with precisely this coexistence.
And so he has already realized films in which dubious sounds, created on a single drum cymbal, were made visually perceptible through a one-shot. A one-hour portrait of a musician conveys a feeling for the complex and new aspects of microtonal music in jazz. A multi-nominated experimental film "un|sounding the self", which shows two very different American musicians who deal with the subject of walking on the basis of H. D. Thoreau’s writing and the artistic analysis of John Cage.

Jakob Gengenbach works as a director and editor. His filming experiences abroad are: Czech Republic, Spain, Ghana, Togo and Benin.

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