Date: Wednesday 20 April 2022
Time: 18:30
Venue: Birkbeck Cinema
THIS PROGRAMME IS FREE
Film: Two Faces of A Bamiléké Woman (Les deux visages d’une femme Bamiléké), Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam, Cameroon/Belgium, 2018, DCP, 76 minutes, French with English subtitles
You Will Be My Ally, Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam, Cameroon/Belgium, 2012, DCP, 20 minutes, French with English subtitles
Rosine Mbakam’s first fiction short follows Domè (Bwanga Pilipili), a young woman from Gabon who is apprehended at Brussels airport and accused by immigration officers of travelling under forged documents. After a series of exhausting interrogations and fearing that she will be forced to return to Gabon, Domè initiates a Bwiti ritual to induce childbirth.
In Mbakam’s first feature-length work, the filmmaker, accompanied by her young son, returns to Cameroon seven years after leaving to study film in Belgium. Travelling first to Tonga, her native village, and then to Yaoundé, Mbakam reunites with her mother and the extended community of women that raised her who – through a series of intimate conversations – offer reflections on arranged marriage, family tragedy and life under French colonial rule. Between richly detailed scenes observing her mother’s daily routines and rituals, Mbakam’s measured narration considers her own complex relationship with her familial and national roots.
Rosine Mbakam’s first fiction short follows Domè (Bwanga Pilipili), a young woman from Gabon who is apprehended at Brussels airport and accused by immigration officers of travelling under forged documents. After a series of exhausting interrogations and fearing that she will be forced to return to Gabon, Domè initiates a Bwiti ritual to induce childbirth.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Rosine Mbakam.
In Focus: Rosine Mbakam
The films of Rosine Mbakam give voice to the stories of Cameroonian women at home and overseas, deconstructing cinema’s colonialist gaze on African women and girls. Her first three solo documentary features – The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016), Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and Delphine’s Prayers (2021) – form an extraordinarily empathetic tryptic on the African migrant experience in Europe, and more precisely in Belgium where Mbakam has been based since moving to Brussels from Cameroon to study filmmaking at INSAS. Although formally diverse – from the essayistic and the autobiographical to direct cinema – Mbakam’s work is a testament to the power of female camaraderie and solidarity. Her films explore womanhood and African identity from a position of intimacy, collectivity and self-reflexivity. Her most recent work, Prism co-directed with An van Dienderen and Eléonore Yameogo, is an essay film that addresses the ideological biases that are implicit in cinema’s own technology by challenging the camera’s predisposition towards white skin.
‘As African filmmakers studying in Belgium, we are taught Western cinema. I’ve had to deconstruct this to find my own cinema, because the way cinema is made in the West is not my way of doing cinema. It’s not the same reality. If I take the Western approach to making movies, I will destroy the singularity of the story that I want to film. I have to find, each time, the right way of filming the situation, story, or subject at hand.’ (Mbakam)
In Focus: Rosine Mbakam is the first survey of Mbakam’s work in the UK. It includes the UK premiere of Prism (Rosine Mbakam, An van Dienderen, Eléonore Yameogo), along with a retrospective of Mbakam’s earlier work. The season is presented by the Essay Film Festival and Open City Documentary Festival, in collaboration with the ICA.
About Rosine Mbakam: Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam grew up in a traditional Cameroonian family. She learnt about filmmaking through the Italian NGO Centro Orientamento Educativo and would go on to make programmes for Spectrum Television before leaving Cameroon in 2007 to study film at INSAS in Belgium. Her critically acclaimed documentary films have been shown at numerous international festivals (IFFR, Fespaco, Dok Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield DocFest, NYFF) and were the subject of a retrospective at MoMA in 2021. She divides her time between her production company (Tândor Productions in Belgium and Tândor Films in Cameroon) where she works on several projects and her teaching activities at KASK in Ghent (Belgium).
In collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival
With the support of Wallonia-Brussels International
