Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam’s first two features are set to make their joint theatrical premiere. Women and Hollywood can reveal that “The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman” and “Chez Jolie Coiffure” will debut October 16 in New York.
“The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman” sees Mbakam returning to Cameroon seven years after moving to Belgium. She travels to the village of her birth, and later to the capital city of Yaoundé, where her mother “shares memories of the horrors of the war against French colonizers, and of daily life for a Cameroonian woman in an arranged marriage — a fate Rosine herself barely escaped, leaving the family of an angry ex-fiance behind,” the 2017 doc’s synopsis hints.
Mbakam’s follow-up, 2019’s “Chez Jolie Coiffure,” was filmed over the course of a year in a single room — an underground hair salon run by Sabine, a Cameroonian immigrant. “More than a place for women to get their hair done, Jolie Coiffure serves as a community hub for West African women — many from Cameroon, like Sabine. Fueled by endless cans of soda and cups of McDonald’s coffee, she recruits for a tontine — an investment scheme paying each member a yearly annuity, organizes accommodation for a pregnant woman who lacks immigration papers, and, in quieter, more introspective moments, tells her own harrowing journey to Belgium after working as a domestic under terrible conditions in Lebanon,” a summary of the doc explains.
Check out an exclusive trailer for “The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman” and “Chez Jolie Coiffure” below.
