The Power of Looking at the Everyday

In her narrative feature debut, Mambar Pierrette, Cameroonian documentarian, Rosine Mbakam, captures life in crisis-stricken Cameroon and the resilience and fortitude that Cameroonian women must embody every day.

Rosine Mbakam’s Mambar Pierrette starts off simple. Our titular character (played by Mbakam’s cousin, Pierrette Aboheu Njeutha), a talented seamstress, is awake before the rest of her family, plunging herself into domestic work. She prepares the food for the day, gets her ailing mother out of bed, and checks on her children before she makes her way to her shop. Even though the father of her children is alive, Pierrette is basically a single mother and the pressures of making sure that her household and the lives of everyone around her continue to run as smoothly as possible are present instantly. Pierrette has a long day ahead of her and to the credit of Mbakam’s directorial eye, we are right there by her side.

Mbakam’s narrative feature debut is a reflective and intimate look at ordinary life through the lens of a woman who has to rely on her resilience and the community of women around her to deal with the setbacks and misfortunes that come her way. Set in the city of Douala, Cameroon, Mambar Pierrette sheds light on the conditions of ordinary Cameroonian women as they navigate a system that has little to no regard for their all-around wellbeing. Despite everything, Mbakam’s Pierrette finds a way to move forward.

A DOCUMENTARIAN TURNED FICTION FILM DIRECTOR

In an interview with Film Comment’s Devika Girish, Mbakam said that her love for and desire to make films ‘began with the people I grew up seeing in my daily life, in my culture.’ Born and raised in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Mbakam was always surrounded by strong women. Even as she watched her mother, her aunt, and her sisters go through different hardships, all she saw and found inspiring was the way they seemed to push through. Mbakam’s first feature documentary, The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, was released in 2018 and follows Mbakam as she reunites with her mother in Cameroon after living in Belgium for seven years. Her second documentary, Chez Jolie Coiffure, was released the same year, where she explores the day-to-day lives of a group of immigrant West African women who work at a hair salon in Brussels. Mbakam’s focus on the lives of Cameroonian women continued with her third documentary, Delphine’s Prayers, an intimate and emotional portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian woman living in Belgium, who recounts her life.

With Mambar Pierrette, Mbakam forays into fiction but her documentarian eye is as sharp as it was in her last three instalments. The ease with which she creates the cinematic realism is a testament to the care she gives to the women she chooses to focus on in her work and the attention with which she follows Pierrette’s story is no different. With many of her family members starring in the film, not only is she telling her cousin’s story, but she is also telling the story of the generations of women in her family...

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