Icarus Films: Two Faces of the Bamileke Woman

The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman

Directed by Rosine Mbakam

76 minutes / Color
French; Bamileke / English subtitles
Release: 2019
Copyright: 2016

Also included in the 4-disc boxset, Prisms and Portraits: The Films of Rosine Mbakam.

“Cinema is things you film and everyone can watch. Things that sometimes happen right in front us. Or things that we will never see that are shown to us.” —Mâ Brêh

Rosine Mbakam left Cameroon at 27 to live in Belgium. Seven years later—having studied film and married a European—she returns, accompanied by her son. Motivated by a desire to better understand her past and the place she grew up, Rosine is nonetheless surprised by the revelations her mother and other women make in startlingly intimate conversations.

THE TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN opens with Rosine making what she calls a journey into darkness—to the village of her birth, and later to the capital city of Yaoundé, where her mother now lives most of the year. In the village of Tonga, her mother, Mâ Brêh, shares memories of the horrors of the war against French colonizers, and of daily life for a Cameroonian woman in an arranged marriage—a fate Rosine herself barely escaped, leaving the family of an angry ex-fiance behind.

Rosine accompanies her mother, aunts, and other women while they go about daily tasks: cooking fish, serving kokistew to a crowd, and selling goods at a thriving market stall. Like many immigrants, she finds herself distant from her home country, yet drawn to its rituals and memories. She goes through a dusty suitcase of her late father’s documents, asks if she has damaged family traditions by marrying a white man, teaches her son to say “I love you grandma” in Bamikele, and asks her mother to do a traditional post-birth ritual several years after the fact.

As she spends more time with her mother and the women around her, Rosine reveals the strength of their solidarity and their ability to face adversity—whether hiding for their lives from French soldiers or being committed to a man for marriage at age eight. This world of women’s work and women’s struggles is one that surrounded her in her early years, but she couldn’t recognize it—or its complexity—until she had been away from the social structures of her country.

THE TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN is a sharply observed, nuanced and powerful feature documentary debut that captures the relationship between a woman and her mother—and subtly expresses the dislocation of emigration.

“Critic's Pick! Mbakam demonstrates a mastery of perspective, a rare ability to include the camera in community.” —Teo Bugbee, The New York Times

“Wrought with bliss and wonder; an exciting contribution to the canon of contemporary African cinema.” —Alexandra M. Thomas, Yale University, in the journal H-Black Europe

"Meet the filmmaker reinventing how African women are portrayed in movies. [In The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, director Rosine Mbakam] engages the women in her family and her community in conversations about their rituals and experiences.” —Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, National Public Radio (NPR)

"An honest, captivating documentary essay.” —Jagoda Murczyńska, AfryKamera

"Touching; Mbakam is a cinematic artist… Reveals much about gender and family relations in postcolonial Africa.” —Carmela Garritano, Texas A&M University, in the journal African Studies Review

“Extraordinary in substance and style. An original filmmaker of exquisite sensibility; one of the foremost filmmakers of creative nonfiction working right now.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker