NPR

Meet The Filmmaker Reinventing How African Women Are Portrayed In Movies

Two deeply personal films from Cameroonian Rosine Mbakam won critical acclaim in the U.S. by grappling with how families maintain traditions in a time of global migration and generational change.
Rosine Mbakam, left, says she chose to shoot all images and sound herself to maintain an equal relationship with the subjects of her films.

In Cameroon's Bamiléké culture, a woman gives birth to her child surrounded by the entire family. The following days are filled with post-birth customs and traditions.

Rosine Mbakam, a Cameroonian filmmaker, did not get to experience these traditions. She gave birth to her first son in Belgium in 2012, alone in the hospital with her husband. Thinking about her family back home, she started crying, she says now. And then, after some time, she began writing.

"I started to just write a portrait of my mother because I was missing her," Mbakam says. "I started to just write all the conversations that I wanted to have with my mother,

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