As with Chez jolie coiffure, Delphine’s Prayers takes place in a single enclosed space with one woman at its center. Aside from the filmmaker’s presence, Delphine is the sole star here. Sitting up casually in her bed, she treats the experience like a video diary, candidly and passionately relating her painful tale for the first time. Compelled by desperate circumstances into sex work and eventually marriage, she describes a life besieged by poverty, loss, violence and trauma. Her confidante, fellow Cameroonian Mbakam, also immigrated to Belgium, yet under very different circumstances. In their collaboration, it is sometimes Delphine who directs, signaling when to end for the day, telling Mbakam to sit down, “or I won’t be able to relax.”  Not merely tragedy, her saga is filled with heroic efforts to help others or to simply stay alive, only to be met with rejection and further abuse from her family and fellow Cameroonians, later by racist Europeans, and now she sacrifices herself for her children’s needs, while supporting family back home. In Mbakam’s film, Delphine emerges as a defiant survivor and brave warrior, telling her own story for others and praying for a better one for herself. “I am not dead,” proclaims Delphine. “I’m still here. Now that I’m here, I can bear witness.”