17/03/2022 - Nganji Mutiri paints an intimate portrait, between Brussels and Kinshasa, of a mother and son’s reunion impeded by history, absence and things left unsaid

Amani was ten when he was separated from his political journalist mother Riziki following violent events in Kinshasa which led to his father’s death. Ten years later, he travels to Brussels to study but he also feels he needs to find her. Unfortunately, he just can’t get past her ten-year absence which has left him feeling abandoned. Instead of finding himself, the young man slowly begins to lose himself, unable to rebuild a connection with a mother he sees as unattached and disloyal.

Screened in a European premiere at the Mons International Film Festival having previously been unveiled in a world premiere at Fespaco, Juwaa is the first feature film by Nganji Mutiri, a multi-faceted artist originally from Bukavu and now living in Brussels. An actor, a photographer and a writer, Mutiri made several short films before taking the plunge into feature films, following a call for lightweight production projects launched by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Film and Audiovisual Centre, who were looking to support movies produced with low budgets which were able to incorporate these constraints artistically, mostly via a certain unity of place and time, and a limited number of characters.

Juwaa, therefore, follows the path walked by Amani and the pas de deux which his mum clumsily attempts to dance with him. Nganji Mutiri reflects upon and asks us how to go about restoring the filial and maternal bond in a context of absence and distance. How can ties be renewed when things left unsaid reign supreme and when the truth is yet to be told?

Amani doesn’t know everything about why his mother left. He knows about grief, death and blood. But what does he really know about what she was trying to escape? As a political journalist, she narrowly escaped the death which was meted out to her husband, Amani’s father. To remain would have meant placing her son in danger. Leaving with him would have deprived him of his security and his roots.

But good intentions sometimes lose their power over time. When Amani finds his mother, she has rebuilt a new life for herself and reinvented herself without him, while he’s still struggling to invent himself in the first place. This complicated relationship paves the way to other potentially toxic relationships. Juwaa focuses on this traumatic relational tangle and the consequences it has on Amani’s life. Their conflictual relationship casts a shadow over all of Amani’s other relationships. Other characters orbit the couple - family members, friends, lovers - who all highlight the dysfunctional side of this primary, matrix-like relationship which also dictates his relationship with the world.

With modest means (and little time, which can sometimes be felt in the film’s desire to say too much, sometimes to the point of losing the audience in secondary plotlines) but a keen sense of photography and artistic direction, Nganji Mutiri depicts this mother-son relationship while reflecting upon black identity when they’re split between two continents and have two different ways of living out this identity. The film is carried by two actors wholly committed to their roles: Edson Anibal, in his first leading role, who delivers a spot-on depiction of an ambivalent young man looking for his place as a man and a son, and Babetida Sadjo, whom we recently saw in the Netflix series Into the Night [+see also:
series review
interview: Dirk Verheye and Inti Calfat
series profile] and whom we’re delighted to be seeing in another Belgian film after Pieter Van Hees’ Waste Land [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pieter Van Hees
film profile]  in 2014.

Juwaa is produced by Dancing Dog Productions.

(Translated from French)