24/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The Belgium-based Cameroonian filmmaker talks about her film showing the daily life of a worker and mother who takes hold of her destiny

Known for her intense and hard-hitting documentary work, which often involves painting powerful portraits of women such as in Chez Jolie Coiffure and Delphine's Prayers, Rosine Mbakam is this year present in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight with Mambar Pierrette [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Rosine Mbakam
film profile], a fiction film built on the real life of her cousin, a seamstress valiantly facing rain and floods in her Douala workshop.

Cineuropa: We know your previous films, portraits of women that could fall into the category of documentaries. Mambar Pierrette is a story that is written, borrowing from fiction. How has this new film enriched your work and the reflection?
Rosine Mbakam: When I first started wanting to make films, it’s fiction I had in mind. I discovered creative documentary in film school. Documentary filmmaking was a tool that allowed me to deal with my shyness when it comes to directing, because it allowed me to be independent and to do things on my own. Documentary filmmaking also allowed me to look for my own cinema, to understand the way I wanted to make fiction films. With Mambar Pierrette, I wanted to return to this first desire for fiction. My family is who initiated my first desires for fiction. With Pierrette, my cousin, we were often talking on WhatsApp, chatting about our daily lives. I wanted to question some of the urgent topics I was discussing with her, questions about work, unemployment, children, education. I relied on our exchanges to write this story, build upon her reality, her lived experience. 

You also pay particular attention to the gestures of work, and its temporality.
This is something I inherited from my father. He was always telling me: "everything you do, take the time to do it well". I find that in cinema, we always eclipse the time of work. For Pierrette, sewing isn’t just a job, it’s more than that. It’s a passion. It’s how she makes a living. Making a dress allows her to pay for her children’s studies, for food, for electricity, for the family’s daily needs. It isn’t just about making a dress. I wanted to show the time that passes, to make it felt. 

You say that, for you, cinema being a power relation, it is important to find a balance with your protagonists.
Cinema is an art of power by its very essence. When you’re holding a camera, you scrutinise faces, bodies, without the person being filmed able to see it or sometimes even understand it, and it’s already a power relation in itself. This power is used in a conscious or unconscious way by certain filmmakers to put people where they want them to be in order to tell their stories.

I am very vigilant about this power relation, because I know that it has managed to confine the history of Africa, and the image of Black people. I am careful not to reproduce that dynamic. It is important that the people I film are free to be whatever they want and can be beyond my own intentions. And I want to share this power in my films, I give space for people to take hold of the story, to bring it closer to their own reality. This is what Pierrette has done. I would show her what I wanted to do, and she would sometimes tell me that she wished to do it differently, because in that way she would feel good. She would take the main idea, and imbue it with her knowledge. She would bring the fiction I had written closer to herself and charge it with her own reality. 

You produce your films yourself, is that essential for you to make the films you dream of?
I could very well see that here in Europe, producers had a very specific idea of how I should film my reality, often without listening to what I had to say. I was searching for my own cinema, and I couldn’t see myself fighting to educate people about what I wanted to do. I already had to fight to get the films accepted into commissions, I didn’t want to also have to fight with producers. Ethiopian director Haile Gerima says: "You must create your own space of freedom, because when the industry will ignore you and will no longer recognise you, you will still have this space to continue expressing yourself." Tândor Productions is my space of freedom, which has allowed me to make my first films with nothing at all. This allows me to maintain my vision, my thoughts, but also the singularity of the people I film. I do not want to let myself be confined by the industry, a mode of production that frames, limits, encloses things. 

(Translated from French)