The city of Douala is in trepidation for the start of the new school year. A long line of customers come to Mambar Pierrette, the neighbourhood dressmaker, to have their clothes ready for imminent social events and ceremonies. More than just a sewer, Pierrette becomes the confidant of her customers, of a generation. But when the rain starts pouring down and threaten to flood her workshop – one of several successive misfortunes – Pierrette will have to stay afloat.
Rosine Mbakam is invited to step in Sabine’s small hairdresser’s because it is dangerous in the street. She accepts and pushes in with her camera. Sabine’s stories and the customers’ joys, worries, problems and fears bring depth and life into the premises. At times, it feels like the entire African quarter of Brussels had squeezed in. Laughter abounds, anecdotes and life stories elicit emotions, and a male visitor brings a touch of flirt into the salon.
This film is the portrait of Delphine, a young Cameroonian girl who, after the death of her mother and the abandonment of her father’s parental responsibilities, was raped at the age of 13. She sinks into prostitution to support herself and her daughter. She ends up marrying a Belgian man who is three times her age, hoping to find a better life in Europe for her and her daughter. Seven years later, the European dream has faded and her situation has only gotten worse.Delphine, like others, is part of this generation of young African women crushed by our patriarchal societies and left with this Western sexual colonization as the only means of survival. Through her courage and strength, Delphine exposes these patterns of domination that continue to lock up African women.
Hazem arrives in Belgium after a painful journey from Gaza. Elettra arrives in Brussels to study documentary film. Their first moments together spark a desire to get to know each other, and the camera becomes the tool they use to listen to each other. Exiles and internal migration enable them to meet where the gaze is gentler and fairer.
For Prism, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Brussels-based Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon and Paris-based Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso to work together on a film in which the differences in their skin color serves as a departure to explore their experiences with the biased limitations of the medium. Photographic media are technologically and ideologically biased, favoring Caucasian skin. Such white-centricity means that the photographic media assume, privilege and construct whiteness.
The return of a young filmmaker to her home country, Cameroon, and her reunion with her mother.
