Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo holds a Ph.D. in science and technology studies from Cornell University and has been teaching at another Ivy League college for the past five years. She’s also the underground rapper Sammus, who takes her name from Nintendo video game franchise “Metroid.” Sammus, like the bounty hunter heroine of the series, occasionally wields an arm cannon on stage.

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That’s an intriguing contrast, but it only begins to encapsulate Lumumba-Kasongo, who raps on her 2016 track “Mighty Morphing” that she’s not one thing, two things, three things or even four things. A new documentary playing the Philadelphia Film Festival attempts to weave them all together.

“Enongo” picks up in 2018 as Lumumba-Kasongo makes music and finishes her dissertation. Though her academic work is based in Ithaca, New York, and many of her shows take her to Manhattan and Brooklyn, Lumumba-Kasongo commutes to and from Philadelphia to be with her fiancé (now, husband) Lanre Akinsiku. She travels to Canada and the Midwest at other points in the documentary. The closing chapter shows the beginnings of her current life in Rhode Island; she and Akinsiku both teach at Brown University.

“This was, I guess, my first cross-country movie in that sense,” the film’s director Kevin Schreck said.

Schreck wasn’t looking to make a movie when he caught a Sammus show in Manhattan’s East Village in 2016. But the filmmaker from Minneapolis was “completely floored” by the performance, which struck him as inherently cinematic. Meeting Lumumba-Kasongo after the concert only pulled him further in.

“She was a radically different person behind the scenes,” Schreck said. “So quiet and demure and self-deprecating. So different from the bravado and charisma and just power that I saw on stage earlier. I thought that was really compelling, too. So I just wanted to know everything about her.”

It took him another year and a half to pitch Lumumba-Kasongo on the project, but she quickly agreed. From 2018 through early 2020, Schreck followed her around the country – to concerts, music festivals, video game conventions, classrooms, recording studios and quiet living rooms. Along the way, he interviewed Lumumba-Kasongo about everything from her evolving artistic identity to depression. Early in the film, she proudly shows off her multiple copies of “Sideways,” the 2004 dramedy that got her through a particularly bad spell.

To illustrate some of these personal stories, Schreck hired an all-female animation team. Black-and-white cartoons of Lumumba-Kasongo take over the screen when she recounts childhood anxieties or how she fell in love with Akinsiku. These sequences vary in style, depending on which of the 10 animators made them. Legendary artist Dan Haskett, who designed the heroines of “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” served as a mentor and provided initial character sketches.

The animation, Schreck notes, probably made the movie “four times more expensive,” but also “10 times better.”

Black-and-white animation of a woman in armorBlack-and-white animation of a woman in armorProvided image/Kevin Schreck Productions

An all-female team of animators illustrated Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo at various points in her life in the documentary ‘Enongo.’ A still from one sequence is pictured above.

“Because I love animation, I respect it, and I don’t think of it as a cute easy gimmick or form of filler in documentary,” Schreck said. “I’ve seen it treated like filler. I’ve seen it done cheaply. I’ve seen it done insincerely. I don’t want to abuse that. And also, I know that if you’re gonna do it right, it’s wildly expensive and time-consuming and involved. 

“But when I was putting together her story, she’s such a great orator, such a great storyteller, both on stage and when communicating in more personal settings, like in her interviews. And there were really important facets of her upbringing, her world views, her experiences that were deserving of a cinematic treatment to tell her story properly.”

Schreck and his animators, including Philly-based artist Anaiyah Tatiana, coordinated remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. The production caught up with Lumumba-Kasongo once more in 2024, and wrapped later that year. The film was officially finished in early 2025.

“Enongo,” which plays its first PFF showing Friday night, has been on the film festival circuit since August. It’ll continue onto Minneapolis, Queens and St. Louis later this fall, but Schreck hopes to find a distributor who will put the film in front of more audiences. 

“I wanna see this thing go places,” Schreck said. “I think this story is relevant and, dare I say, needed for a lot of people. I think it’s a timely piece. I think it’s also a timeless piece. And I say that from complete self-deprecating, upper Midwestern humility here. 

“I don’t usually laud my work and try to sell it this way, but I do think that there is something that connects with a lot of people. … I’ve had so many people misty-eyed and relieved and joyful come up to me saying, I felt very seen watching this.”

“Enongo” is playing this Friday at 6:45 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 25, at 9:30 p.m. at PFS Bourse theater.

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