Rosine Mbakam

“The films that help me to really think about how I would like to do the cinema was Mandabi of Sembène. When I saw that film I, I just really, really see for the first time someone who was looking at me, someone who was looking at my culture. I was looking, when I was child, a lot of American films and French film also, but it was open me to the world, but not connect me to my reality. It was the first time that I was seeing a film that really connect me to my reality, yeah.”

“And, Black Girl. I grew up in Cameroon and wanted to do cinema without having any legacy about cinema. My parents was just a modest family in Yaoundé, Cameroon, living their life and offer us something good by sending us in school. But I wanted to do, to dream, to dream about story. And Black Girl really putting in, putting in my face my own colonization, because I went to Belgium study cinema and hoping that in Belgium I would learn how to tell my story. But I, I, I discovered that I already have it in me, and what I really learned in Belgium was just some tools or how to think about that cinema. And it's when I watch Black Girl that I really, I have that, that phrase in my mind: "What do you want to say, Rosine? What do you want to say?"”

“Bicycle Thieves. I don't really, in my way of doing, I don't create something, I just find it in the daily life of people and organize it, because I really hope that we all have a part of cinema in us and I just have to find it, yeah. And the Bicycle Thieves really help me to just see that, that yes, that reality was possible, that just to capture the reality as it is, as we are seeing it.”

“And then we have Close-Up. The mixing of fiction and documentary was so powerful that I was, like Safi Faye said, there was no boundary between, as African we don't have no limit between fiction and documentary. And, and Close-Up, it's really in alignment with that. It also opened me to the work of Makhmalbaf and, and how, how I was connected to, to people that I don't even know or imagine before, and how I was so close to that reality only because they, they frame it in a certain way and they show it in a certain way. Also free me, free me to just say to myself: I don't have to choose between documentary and, and fiction, I just want to just tell story as I really felt it, yeah.”