User:Bee Daft/Rosine Mbakam

Rosine Mbakam (born in 1980) is a Cameroonian director based in Belgium. She has directed many short films and full-length feature films, of which the most well-known are documentaries. Les deux visages d'une femme Bamiléké/The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman (2016) and Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) won a number of international prizes. Her recent films, including Les prières de Delphine/Delphine’s Prayers (2021), have been very successful and have gotten a lot of attention from US news sources, including The New York Times, The New Yorke r,  LA Times, Variety, and NPR.

1. Biography
Rosine Mbakam was born in Cameroon in 1980. She grew up in a traditional Bamiléké family. She spent her childhood in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon.

Rosine Mbakam made her debut in cinema in 2001 and gained an education in thorough audiovisual media in Cameroon between 2000 and 2004 at the center of COE (Centro orientamento Educativo), an Italian nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Yaoundé. She then joined the private Cameroonian television channel Spectrum Télévision (STV) where she worked as a photojournalist and directed programs from 2003 to 2007. In 2007, when she was 27, she left Cameroon for Belgium and enrolled in Institut Supérieur des Arts (INSAS) in Brussels, where she continued her studies in film and audiovisual production. She graduated from INSAS in 2012.

2. Career
Rosine Mbakam directed her first films in 2009 while she was still a student. This includes a few short films: Un cadeau released in 2010 and Les Portes du Passé released in 2011. With Mikro Popovitch in 2011, she co-directed the film Mavambu, which is a portrait of the Congolese artist, Freddy Tsimba, and was produced by Africalia. After obtaining her degree in 2012, she directed and edited films and documentaries for the society of Africalia production at the same time as directing her own. In 2014, she co-founded the production company. As an extension of her own filmmaking career, Mbakam serves as an instructor to students at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK).

2.1 The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman

In 2016, Rosine Mbakam directed her first feature film, a creative documentary titled Les deux visages d'une femme Bamiléké (The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman). The 76-minute film is a personal documentary in which the director focuses on her return to her native country with her French husband and their son, 7 years after she left. The film is built by a series of conversations mainly between Mbakam and her mother on varied subjects connected to family, gender, and also politics. The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) are among the sixty-plus film festivals at which this movie has been screened.

2.2 Chez Jolie Coiffure

In 2018, she directed Chez Jolie Coiffure. This 71-minute documentary concerns the immigration, daily life, and difficulties experienced by African immigrants in Europe. The film takes place in a hair salon in the neighborhood of Matonge in Brussels and focuses on the stories of the owner, a Cameroonian immigrant woman seeking residency along with her friends.

2.3 Delphine’s Prayers

In 2021, Rosine Mbakam directed a third documentary called Les prières de Delphine (Delphine’s Prayers). This film is a portrayal of Delphine, a young Cameroonian woman who has been caught in sex work in Cameroon. She was abandoned by her father after the death of her mother, and by age 13, she was raped and pregnant with a daughter. Sex work becomes her ticket to Beligum after she makes a man who is 3 times her age her husband.

3. Personal Life
In 2014, she visited her home in Cameroon for the first time in 7 years after leaving for Belgium and getting married to her husband. They now have two sons.

6. Press
"Rosine Mbakam’s stark, straightforward but subtly potent documentary doesn’t leave Sabine’s tiny workplace once in the lm’s 70-minute runtime, viewing her much-traveled, much-punished life through the prism of its four close walls, and the vibrant but vulnerable community that lls the space.“Chez Jolie Coiffure” is one of a pair of complementary but individually self-contained documentaries by Mbakam to examine West African female identity and displacement, both simultaneously released Stateside by Icarus Films. The other, “The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman,” is more autobiographical, movingly following the lmmaker — herself a Cameroonian expat in Belgium — as she returns to her homeland, observing her mother’s place and routine in a society to which Mbakam feels both a child and a stranger. “Chez Jolie Coiffure” is the inverse lm, with Mbakam remaining a largely silent behind-the-camera witness to a fellow migrant’s disorientation, in this case trying to carve out her own space on foreign turf."

– ‘Chez Jolie Coiffure’: Film Review in VARIETY

"Amplifying their valuable accounts, which are inherently tied to her own, Mbakam responsibly serves as protector of this collective bond and shared history. Like all great documentarians, Mbakam synthesizes objectivity and idiosyncrasy during the process of extracting meaning from what occurs in front of her or the conversations she engages in. The camera acts as a direct extension of her eyes. She’d seen these women before but not through the revelatory lens of cinema, and what she discovered about them and herself is maybe more truthful than what reality alone can discern. "

– African expat lmmaker Rosine Mbakam reveals the strength of women through cinema in LOS ANGELES TIMES

"With a view that is at once intimate and distant,Mbakam shows the duality of diasporic identity; she is never totally at home,and never totally without it.In both of her short lms, Mbakam demonstrates a mastery of perspective, a rare ability to include the camera in community. Her lms do not give voice to her subjects — rather, she shares with women the chance to speak for themselves. "

– ‘Two Films From Rosine Mbakam Explore West African Women’s Identity in The NEW YORK TIMES

"She delves deep into family history and intimate experience and opens it out into a wide web of societal connections and political implications. “The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman,” together with her second feature, “Chez Jolie Coiffure” (2018), which are both opening at the Anthology Film Archives today, for a weeklong run, reveal Mbakam to be one of the foremost lmmakers of creative non ction working right now. Mbakam’s compositional sense—her cinematic thought in action—is revealed throughout the rest of the lm, and informs all of her work."

– Rosine Mbakam’s Intimate Documentaries of Cameroon and the Diaspora in THE NEW YORKER

“Extraordinary in substance and style. An original filmmaker of exquisite sensibility; one of the foremost filmmakers of creative nonfiction working right now.”

—The Films of Rosine Mbakam in THE NEW YORKER

8. External Links
Here are some ways that one can watch Delphine's Prayers: https://www.cinemadureel.org/film/les-prieres-de-delphine/?lang=en or https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/6967or http://icarusfilms.com/if-delph.

One can watch Chez Jolie Coiffure for free on http://docuseek2.com/cart/product/2005 or on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Jolie-Coiffure-Rosine-Mfetgo-Mbakam/dp/B08DJW4HQY.

A way to watch The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman is on http://docuseek2.com/if-bamil