Mbakam, Rosine

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    ‘Mambar Pierrette’ Review: Cosmic Misfortunes

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    A gifted seamstress, played by the filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s cousin, has to put out a string of fires in this rich portrait of Cameroonian womanhood.Pierrette, a gifted seamstress and a mother of three, can’t seem to catch a break. After a hard day’s work at her humble shop in Douala, a busy city in Cameroon, she’s mugged by a motorcycle taxi driver. It’s also the rainy season and her home — and later her shop — is flooded overnight. It’s a foul time to be broke: The kids are heading back to school and their supplies aren’t cheap.The events of “Mambar Pierrette” are fictional, but the film’s nonprofesssional actors play versions of themselves. The drama is the first narrative feature by Rosine Mbakam, a Cameroonian filmmaker based in Belgium. Over the past decade, Mbakam has distinguished herself as a formidable verité-style documentarian; her subjects, Cameroonian women at home and overseas.Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, cast in the title role, is Mbakam’s cousin, and many of the figures who orbit Pierrette’s life are the actress’s neighbors and relatives.A rich community portrait unfolds as Pierrette prepares her clients’ orders and flits around town putting out fires. We get a sense of the patriarchal customs that dictate village life; the frictions between modern, enterprising women like Pierrette and tradition-bound ones like her mother. These and other realities are made apparent in a beautifully organic manner, through the kind of intimate chatter that happens between people who’ve known each other for decades.Pierrette’s rotten luck is no joke. We see, with startling clarity, how a stolen wallet turns into a missed payment, and an electricity shut-off means a sewing machine that can’t sew. Yet the film’s gentle naturalism (at times edging on the uncanny, courtesy of cheeky editing rhythms and an unsettling-looking mannequin) gives her tribulations a cosmic undertone.Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa. Also palpable is a more universal gut feeling: the half-serious suspicion that one has been cursed.Mambar PierretteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Prism’ Review: Taking a Clear View of Bias in Moviemaking

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      In this documentary, three filmmakers put together their own segments that ponder their profession’s culpability.In “Prism,” the directors Rosine Mbakam, An van. Dienderen and Eléonore Yameogo join forces to ask, “Is the very technology of cinema biased?”In 2015, van. Dienderen made “Lili,” a short film that interrogated cinema’s use of China Girls. That’s the name for the test images — typically of a white woman and a color bar — used since the 1920s for film processing calibrations. “Prism” is the result of van. Dienderen’s invitation to Mbakam and Yameogo to ponder their profession’s culpability with her, via Zoom and apart in their own segments. Their answers are personal, cultural, theoretical. Their pieces speak to each other, concurring but diverging too.Densely thoughtful, “Prism” has beautiful and poignant moments. In van. Dienderen’s section, a camera tracks through an art school campus to a television studio where it finds a Black woman, a white man and a color bar. In her layered piece, Mbakam questions two of her former film school professors, both white men. She also reconstructs Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait de négresse” as a living sculpture in which the model’s gaze meets the camera’s with a steady and gorgeous defiance. In Yameogo’s contribution, the actor Tella Kphomahou interviews Diarra Sourank, a cinematographer, and the French-Senegalese director Sylvestre Amoussou about the challenges faced as Black filmmakers.While a great deal here is sober, Yameogo’s piece teases a “60-Minutes”-style conceit that provokes and amuses. In it, Kphomahou interviews a camera. As the actor poses questions, smiling wryly, the camera appears to be paying Cyclopean attention to its hot-seat predicament.PrismNot rated. In French and English with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More