My intention as a Cameroonian filmmaker is to decolonize myself from what I have learned from film and from what I have seen. African cinema is colonized by other forms of cinema. It is important for me to free myself from all this to find a form that is fair to the people I film.​​​​

Born and raised in Cameroon, now living in Belgium, Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam (b. 1980) has created a respectively hybrid place for herself in the cinematic landscape, making resounding works that embrace the powers of both documentary and fiction storytelling. Mbakam pulls up the carpet of colonialism and points to its composition while revealing the infinite worlds hidden by its obliterating expanse. Her poetic and intelligent artistry finds expression within an equitable, non-didactic approach to the production process and its participants. As the recent acclaim and recognition confirms, she is a filmmaker giving today’s world a cinema it needs.

In Cameroon at the age of twenty, Mbakam began learning about filmmaking through the Italian-based NGO Centro Orientamento Educativo and later worked for the private Cameroon channel Spectrum Télévision (STV). She traveled to Belgium to further her film studies at the Institut Supérieur des Arts in Brussels, where she says in an interview with Criterion that she “really” learned about documentary filmmaking: “And I learned how documentaries were used as a tool to legitimize the strategy of colonialism in Europe—and not only colonialism, but all the ideologies of domination. It was clear that I had to use that same documentary approach to deconstruct the remains of colonialism that exist today in our society…”

By questioning and refusing the documentary’s traditional displacement of power, Mbakam creates a compassionate, open space for unheard stories from people generally viewed only in the broad terms of their class, race or economic worth. She exposes both the structures of oppression and the oases that flourish in spite of them. In her documentary Chez jolie coiffure, the literal transparency of a Belgium hair salon allows the stylists and clients—all African immigrants—to be observed by all, and yet their lives remain unseen by the white populace. With the exception of the philosophical Prism, which begins with the question of technology’s built-in prejudices and plunges profoundly into disturbing questions of representation, this disassembly of the colonial gaze takes place less overtly in her films. Making the cinematic equivalent of deep listening, she is never the focus yet often an active presence engaging in conversations and rituals, participating in what emerges as a collaborative film event.

Her films are largely centered around the lives of African women persevering and making their own way—despite misogyny, racism and systemic injustice—no matter what form that may take: her mother in The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman, Sabine in Chez jolie coiffure, Delphine in Delphine’s Prayers, Domé in You Will Be My Ally and the eponymous heroine of Mambar Pierrette. With the exception of Delphine, who is passionately focused on telling her story before the camera, many of the women often converse while working, a pragmatic circumstance that illuminates the essential nature of their labor as well as the care taken and skill required with domestic tasks. Mbakam holds the disregarded work up to the light and delicately folds it into the broader narrative. Within each of the women is a rebellious ingenuity; they creatively find ways around domination, as with the tontine, a communal financial cooperative created by women for women, ensuring their security and, often, independence from their husbands.

In 2014, Mbakam expanded her mission by starting Tândor Productions with editor/producer Geoffroy Cernaix, producing and distributing her films along with those of like-minded contemporaries. A few years later, she added a mobile version in Cameroon, Caravane Cinéma, through which she screens her films at local tontines, schools, companies or other community centers accompanied by conversations and workshops. During festival screenings of Chez jolie coiffure and Delphine’s Prayers, she would usually be accompanied by the respective film’s star. Mbakam’s films do not simply come to an end, they continue on, participating in the world--and most importantly, in Cameroon--where European-made cinema has taken over. As she proclaims in Prism, “For me cinema is the people, those who see it and take it with them back to their reality. It’s not a concept.”

Mbakam’s expansive, dynamic style has achieved perhaps its most astonishing manifestation in her latest film and first fictive feature, Mambar Pierrette, about the everyday existence and quiet majesty of a Cameroonian woman, played by her cousin. Regarding its narrative elements, the filmmaker notes, “I needed a narrative approach to help me make visible what was invisible in her life. Fiction filmmaking here has a specific purpose. That is, fiction can add to the story I want to tell and give weight to it. It’s not only Pierrette that we see. We see a generation of Cameroonians working under the same difficult conditions. We also see the legacy of what the generation before was thinking. Fiction helped me to give density to the story.” – Brittany Gravely

The Harvard Film Archive and the Film Study Center welcome Rosine Mbakam as this year’s McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking recipient. In addition to several screenings at the HFA, including two in-person appearances, Mbakam will be visiting classes, presenting a workshop at the Film Study Center and meeting with other colleagues on campus.