Ekwa Msangi is a Tanzanian-American filmmaker who has written and directed several drama series for mainstream broadcasters in Kenya and South Africa, including “The Agency,” MNET’s first-ever original hour-long Kenyan drama series. Along her journey, Msangi has been awarded the Jerome Foundation Grant, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, as well as Tribeca Institute and Sundance Institute fellowships. “Farewell Amor” is her feature directorial debut.

“Farewell Amor” will premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on January 25.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

EM: “Farewell Amor” is a story about a family that’s lived apart for 17 years while holding onto the fantasy of what life reunited will be, only to discover that the reality is much different from what they had dreamed due to all the ways that the time and distance has changed them. They struggle to find a meeting point, and use dance as a way to find each other and themselves.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

EM: This story was inspired by the true relationship of an aunt and uncle who have been separated due to visa and immigration issues for over 20 years, yet still hold on to the hope of being reunited one day. I often wondered what a reunion would look like, and so this is my creative response to that question.

That was the inspiration, but it’s not something that only foreigners experience. What about people who are incarcerated? Or those who travel for work? There are so many reasons that make separation from our loved ones very common in this day and age, and I wanted to look at that.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

EM: Love, relationships, and the people that we think that we know but probably don’t really — or we only know a certain side of their story. All of us are doing our best given our individual circumstances and backstories, and I think that’s worth celebrating!

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

EM: I come from a very rich tradition of storytelling and narrating that I wanted to convey in the manner in which the story unfolds, so I made the format of the story a non-traditional one, and it took a while to figure out how to make that work so that it would still translate on the screen.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made. 

EM: My producer and I, knowing that we wanted to tell this story, decided to start with a short prequel film and use that as a proof of concept and to garner interest for the feature. From that, we got some grant funding that helped get us into a development lab at Tribeca (Tribeca All Access) and at Sundance (Sundance Feature Film Development Program) where we were able to garner more support for the project.

In the end, we raised about 10 percent from grants, another 25 percent from in-kind services, and then the rest was equity financiers that we pitched the project to and who came on-board as Executive Producers.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

EM: I grew up in East Africa at a time when there was absolutely no programming with African people other than the news, and a few cheap, slapstick comedy shows on the government station. As I mentioned, I come from a family of storytellers with large, robust, and highly imaginative tellings of all sorts of events, but that was never reflected anywhere around me and that irritated me, so I complained about it. A lot. My father, tired of my complaining, challenged me to “go make my own films!”

One late night on TV they showed Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” and it was the first time I’d seen a film with an all-black cast and a black director, so I decided to learn everything about him and essentially do what he did!

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

EM: Best advice: The more specific your story is about you and your unique experience, the more universal it becomes.

Worst advice: Look at the films that have won awards in the past five years, and try to make something like that. You’d be “speaking their language.”

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

EM: Find your tribe. Find the people that support you, support your vision, can listen to you and hear you, and can respect your leadership. Filmmaking is way too hard to be spending your energy fighting with people about things like who’s in charge or whose leadership should be followed.

Sometimes female leadership kicks up feelings in other people that makes them act in ways that are less than supportive, and that’s not only men that I’m talking about — sometimes women can get confused by seeing other women lead as well. That has nothing to do with you, and it’s not your job to counsel them out of their confusion.

Stay focused, surround yourself with at least one person who can support your leadership, don’t discount self-care, and don’t discount your intuition about anybody or anything. That’s part of the beauty of being female: we actually do have spidey senses!

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

EM: A favorite is hard — there are so many! I often refer to Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” for how present and slow-burning her treatment of story is. Her characters constantly have the most delicious underlying tension, and she tends to use very gentle handheld camera, just allowing the frame to breathe a tiny bit — I thought it a very beautiful and moving look at the effect of death/loss and rebuilding oneself after that.

W&H: What differences have you noticed in the industry since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

EM: I think these movements have forced the industry to take a much harder look at how biased and one-sided the story has been for decades and decades. And that having ‘one or two’ breakout films doesn’t suffice. For me personally, its been very hopeful and fruitful in finding allies who truly want to expand the possibilities of narrative storytelling and ‘pass the mic’ a little further out.

It’s shaken up a lot of comfort zones, and while the biases and glass — or concrete — ceilings aren’t all gone overnight, there definitely has been a shift. And even if guilt and shame are the initial motivators for change, it’s a start! Hopefully we can get to a point in the next few years where having at least half of our stories told from the perspective of non-white-men is just normal fare, and not some grand phenomenon or trend.