Unfinished Stories: A Conversation with Rosine Mbakam

Rosine Mbakam’s documentaries are exercises in reconfiguring relations of power. Her first three nonfiction features are all portraits of Cameroonian women, each of whom is invited to participate in coconstructing a cinematic space of testimony, candor, and expressive autonomy. Filmed in Yaoundé, Douala, and Tonga, The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2018) is structured around a series of intimate exchanges between the filmmaker and her mother, Mâ Brêh, whose patience, self-reliance, and knowledge anchor the film. An embodiment of women’s popular memory, Mâ Brêh speaks about everything from the brutalities of French soldiers under colonialism to how to care for the body after birth, while also offering a glimpse of the activities of a women’s collective. Framed by Mbakam’s return to Cameroon with her son in tow, the film is an elegant weaving together of history and remembrance at the personal, familial, and national levels.

Mbakam’s next two films, Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) and Delphine’s Prayers (2021)—set in the small spaces of a hair salon and a bedroom—are studies in seeing women who are visible and valued in their worlds, even if systematically excluded from dominant narratives. Energetic and full of magisterial charm, Sabine runs the salon that comprises Chez Jolie Coiffure’s entire physical setting. She deftly maneuvers around the cramped space: braiding, offering advice and admonition, managing a range of problems. Sabine acts as a centrifugal force and acute commentator, relating her own harrowing trajectory navigating the cruelties of European migration policies while also exemplifying the underground forms of care that make survival possible. By contrast, Delphine is filmed in the privacy of her bedroom. Passionate and perceptive, she transforms the space into a stage for a verbal memoir, sharing the sexual trauma and violence that shadowed her journey from Cameroon to Belgium in a heart-wrenching exposition, which reveals a degree of resilience that should never have been asked of her. In these two documentaries, Mbakam’s methods of patiently building trust and intimacy foreground the self-determination of their protagonists. These films all unfurl through conversation, assembled from ongoing exchanges, with only the lightest guidance from the director’s noninvasive questioning. Fundamentally, Mbakam sees cinema as an active social relation.

Now based in Belgium, Mbakam began her practice working in TV in Cameroon, after which she continued her training at the film school INSAS in Brussels. It was there that she chose to pursue a type of documentary filmmaking that would labor against both the form’s racist, colonialist beginnings in ethnography and the continued philanthropic paternalism of Western renderings of the African continent and its peoples. With a perspective conditioned by openness and generous curiosity, Mbakam mounts a thoughtful, careful assault on the colonial gaze. Mbakam founded Tândor Productions with Geoffroy Cernaix in 2014 and expanded the company to Cameroon in 2018, with the addition of Caravane Cinéma, a mobile infrastructure that tours around the region. Materializing a commitment to film as a collective and accessible activity, Caravane Cinéma shows African films where they might not screen otherwise, contextualizing the screenings with workshops and discussions. In both her films and her related projects, Mbakam prioritizes catalyzing a dialogue with her audiences and a participatory process that seeks to demystify the art form and integrate it into public life.

Mbakam’s films have won multiple awards and been shown at numerous international festivals, including the New York African Film Festival (2018), the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), the West African Film Festival (2018), MoMA’s Doc Fortnight (2021), True/False Film Festival (2021), and IndieLisboa (2021), as well as in theatrical runs, such as the retrospective Prisms and Portraits: The Films of Rosine Mbakam, which played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2021 to accompany her latest work, the collaboratively made Prism (2021). The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman, Chez Jolie Coiffure, and Delphine’s Prayers are now available on the Criterion Channel.

Did you consider making fiction films? Or was it immediately clear that documentaries would be the way to address that absence?: I was thinking of making fiction films, because in Cameroon, I wasn’t seeing any documentaries, and I worked in TV there. I really learned about documentaries when I came here, to Belgium, to study cinema. And I learned how documentaries were used as a tool to legitimize the strategy of colonialism in Europe—and not only colonialism, but all the ideologies of domination. It was clear that I had to use that same documentary approach to deconstruct the remains of colonialism that exist today in our society, because colonialism is not finished. There is neocolonialism. For me, the link between documentary and fiction means I’m between both. I made a film this past summer with my family in Cameroon, and I used them both; there isn’t really a barrier between the two genres.

Absolutely, and African filmmaking has historically played with genres in that way. These absolutist divisions between fact and fiction were also a colonial imposition, and a society’s relationship to storytelling, orality, fact, fiction, and myth is culturally conditioned and not universalizable. I’m also curious about how this potentially decolonial documentary method is reflected in how you handle your subjects, who seem like they should actually be called your collaborators. Could you speak about the process of building a relation through filmmaking? In The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman you seem to be renegotiating your relationship with your mother and the information shared between you, in Chez Jolie Coiffure creating a relationship with Sabine from the ground up, and then in Delphine’s Prayers building on the friendship you already had.: The cinema is an expression of power for me, and as a filmmaker, I think about how to acknowledge and use that power. It was clear to me how that power has been used against minorities in Western film, and it was also clear that I cannot reproduce that way of making films with the people I want to create with. I don’t want to replicate what has been used to dominate me; I want to share that power. In film school we learned that, as a director, you have to direct people, you have to tell them what you want, you have to tell them where they have to be positioned and give every type of direction. But when I’m filming someone, I don’t know their story, and I need those people to help me find it, because they are the main characters of whatever story I want to tell. Sabine and Delphine know their story better than I do, and I want to collaborate with them, to find a way to organize the mise-en-scène so that they feel comfortable participating in the building of their story.

When I say that cinema is an expression of power, that’s also what I was seeing in Western-made films in Africa: the people they were filming, that wasn’t really them. I use the example of Raymond Depardon and his film Afriques: comment ça va avec la douleur? (1996)—all he filmed was poverty in Africa, as though Africa is only poverty. As an African, I found that watching this film made it clear I don’t have the freedom to be represented in the way that I want to be represented. I didn’t have a choice. And by making films I want to give people the choice to be more than what I want them to be, more than my intention, more than what I imagine of them, to be more than that. I want to give them the space to be more than what I came to find. I am sure that in the process of making a film there is something that is unlocked, and that is about sharing power and creating a space of freedom, not only for the people that I film, but also for me, because I learned Western cinema. I didn’t learn about ways to film my reality, my traditions, my story; I have to create those ways to find my own freedom of expression. It’s also about finding a form of expression that is in connection with other people. It’s not something that I come to place on people; it emerges in the process of making films with people.

It seems as though much of the substance of your films is actually in the process, in the weeks, months, years it took, for example, to form a relationship of trust with Sabine, and that the final product is only a small fraction of this much larger whole.: Yes, yes. There is the responsibility of what you bring to the screen, but also what comes after. But that responsibility is not only on me, because I’m not building the film alone but with the people I film. When I distribute a film, I present it with Sabine or Delphine in front of an audience. There is more than the film as object. The film can continue if we give it the space; this collaboration can continue by showing it to people together. I believe that making a film is the story of life, and I think that when I show Delphine’s Prayers in the future, there will be more for Delphine to contribute. The film is not something that is finished. I can go back to The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman with my mother and learn something that will nourish my work today. There is an interconnection, and this is how I see cinema.

Delphine’s story is not finished. Sometimes people in the audience will ask me, “What is her life like today?” And she is right there! She can answer directly. I’m not speaking for her. And I think when Westerners film Africa, it is a “charity cinema.” The people being filmed are not in the center of the story. They are being used to tell the story that the filmmaker wants to tell, not their own story. I call it “charity cinema” because the filmmakers usually say that they are building a space for people to speak and then speak for them. But Delphine directed me and positioned me, and she is creating her own space from where she can speak confidently.

To speak and also not speak. I found that some of the most powerful moments in the film are when Delphine says “enough” or “stop filming,” and it’s an important part of your approach to let her dictate those moments of silence. I think one of the violences of the Western, colonial gaze is precisely that it will not let anyone out of its sight, will force people into its forms of visibility, which are also forms of discipline. On the other hand, your cinema has a careful balance of showing and withholding. Which brings me to the question of your own appearance in the films. How did you decide when to show yourself, and what was your intention in being both behind and in front of the camera?: I chose to put my image in Chez Jolie Coiffure because after a time I found my place there. I filmed Sabine over the course of one year, and after six months of filming, the salon was like home. With my mother it was intentional, because I was going back to Cameroon to find my place. Appearing in the film was an act of taking my place, the place that I left when I came here to Belgium. In Delphine’s Prayers it was a little bit difficult to find my place, because it’s Delphine’s story but also the story of a friendship. I wanted to speak from the place of this friendship and not impose myself on her story. I had to find a way to express that friendship, and it ended up being when we were doing our hair, sharing old stories. It’s only from that position of friendship that I could express and show myself in that film. It was really delicate, even the composition of the image: I’m not looking at the camera at all, because it’s not about me. The way Delphine and I are positioned, we are like one; she’s connected to my head while doing my hair.

Unfinished Stories: A Conversation with Rosine Mbakam

More: Interviews

The Frontlines of Freedom: A Conversation with Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler

Close to Home: A Conversation with Juan Pablo González

Daydreamer: A Conversation with Sara Driver

The Perverse Magic of Long Ago: John Greyson on His Landmark Film Lilies

Search