22/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: Rosine Mbakam paints the kaleidoscopic portrait of a seamstress who takes her destiny in hand through her enterprise and whose workshop opens a window onto a whole community

It begins with the noises and gestures of domestic work. Pierrette gets up before everyone else: before her mother, before her children. She prepares them for the day ahead, taking care of little ones and older ones. A day of work is beginning, a first day. A day that starts under the sign of water, disrupted by the showers which are flooding their home, resulting in a lake to clear before setting off to work. Having now made its way into her workshop, the rain – causing a Sisyphean task in her day-to-day life - has once again upset the precarious balance of her day.

Seamstress Pierrette is the main character in Mambar Pierrette [+see also:
trailer
interview: Rosine Mbakam
film profile], the new documentary by the Cameroon director based in Belgium Rosine Mbakam which is screening in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. Work, for her, is the cornerstone of her existence, at once her passion, her livelihood and a factor in her emancipation. The workshop is at the very centre of her life, but it’s also a crossroads for the community, a real microcosm and refuge. All those who stop by, with a view to buying something or not, speak of their daily lives, their joys and their torments. Little by little, the veil is lifted on their realities: jilted female lovers, women in bad marriages, overwhelmed artisans and outdated artists.

Everything is seen through the prism of Pierrette. The director devised the story alongside her actress, the two of them sharing a sense of authority over the tale. This inhabited fiction depicts the daily life of Pierrette, who lends life and soul to the story on display. We’re with her, we feel the race against time alongside her, the precision involved in the profession, the importance of her tools, and the cost of living, too. The few fictional motifs punctuating the story (the rain as an invisible menace, an evil antagonist; the gruelling hunt for funds to finance the new school year; the meetings with clients as orders trickle in) merge into the time constraints of real life, which require her to work, which tirelessly repeat themselves, and which also fight back; and suspended time, when Pierrette is an actress and the author of her own destiny, thanks to her working power, where she loses herself in dance, a vector of emancipation. It’s a break with the ongoing combat of her daily life, which sees her suddenly free from constraint and putting her struggles and sorrows to one side so as to start over the following day.

Having painted portraits of women carried by dialogue and words in variations on powerful documentaries such as Chez Jolie Coiffure and Delphine’s Prayers, Rosine Mbakam is stepping into the field of fiction, all the while staying true to the truth on the ground and the topography in question. She invents a form of cinema where the protagonist occupies the same level as the director, where the story is written in unison, depending on each of the writers’ agency. Pierrette seems more of an intaglio portrait, not so much in its words as in its gestures, obstinacy, application and perseverance. The freedom she gives herself by emancipating herself through work is incomparable in kind, though it sometimes comes at a cost of toil and uncertainty.

Mambar Pierrette is produced by Belgium firm Tândor Productions, who also have a branch in Cameroon. International sales fall to The Party Film Sales.

(Translated from French)