SYNOPSIS
A seamstress in Douala, Pierrette raises her children alone and looks after her mother. She is used to living hand to mouth, but she still has to navigate the odd pickpocket and the flooding of her house and workshop.

"Rosine Mbakam is a Cameroonian film director based in Belgium. Over the past decade, she has established herself as one of the finest documentarists of her generation through a series of piercing portraits of African women.
 
With Mambar Pierrette—her feature narrative debut—Mbakam returns to her home country, Cameroon, to follow a charismatic protagonist, the seamstress Pierrette (played by the director’s cousin, Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat). There, the city of Douala is in trepidation for the start of the new school year, and a long line of customers come to Mambar Pierrette to have their clothes ready for social events. More than just a dressmaker, Pierrette becomes the confidant of her customers, of a generation of women.
 
When asked about the balance between fiction and documentary modes within this film, Mbakam explained: “The documentary aspect is the life of Pierrette, while the political thread in the film is fiction. It’s not that those political ideas are not part of Pierrette’s life—her circumstances are the consequences of the politics around her—but they’re not so visible in her daily life. If I did a documentary on her, I would have had to force those aspects to come out, and that’s not my way of doing things. My cinema is political, and I wanted to show that there is something more to Pierrette’s situation—the fact that she doesn’t have money, that her husband is irresponsible—that is related to the neocolonialism in Cameroon which is not fully visible, but it is there.” So fiction helped her to point out history…"

(from the introduction to the film by Giovanna Conti, graduate student in Italian Studies)



"Mambar Pierrette is Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam’s first fiction feature. It was chosen as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Quinzaine des Cinéastes selection for 2023. It was also nominated for the First Feature prize at the London Film Festival.
The story follows a seamstress from the city of Douala, who cares for her elderly mother and supports her two youngest children by herself. Though Mambar’s daily life provides the main thread, the film sews a new storyline into its fabric every time a customer enters Mambar’s tailoring shop. These passing figures represent different stages of womanhood, of life; they come and go with their own complaints and disappointments. As Mambar attends to them with a patient ear, her initially focalized narrative steadily begins to stitch itself to the wider socio-economic canvas of Cameroon.
As soon as I give this summary, I want to take it back; it threatens to reorganize the film, to paint an image of it that is consistent not with the film itself but with a certain image of fiction. My sewing metaphors alone reveal a desire to impose a narrative principle onto a film which politely declines it, declines it in the name of a certain image of reality. So, let me begin again.
The fictionality that supposedly sets Mambar Pierrette apart from Mbakam’s previous documentary films is merely the chosen cover, the new alias under which the director renews her commitment to dissolving the boundary between narrative and nonfiction cinema. Mambar Pierrette is her project to erode the wall that separates these two genres, this time from the side of fiction. 
The film’s first target to this end is time: what initially begins as a day-in-the-life movie, slowly surrenders to recording what seems at once to be a week, a month, a season. Heavy rain and the start of the school year are the only time-markers. The temporality of the story starts to match the temporality of filming — continuity errors and unresolved storylines suggest another relationship to dramatic action.
Its second target is tone. The film entertains two tonal archetypes, the clown and the widow, but neither helps it arbitrate between comedy or tragedy. A certain curse seems to follow Mambar as she falls victim to a series of unfortunate events. But fate, much like the advice given to her by her female elders, is something Mambar prefers to ignore. She would rather the quieter, but no less persistent figure of ‘life,’ write her story instead. 
In an interview for The Criterion Collection, Rosine Mbakam summarized her approach to filmmaking by saying: “I do not create; I find and organise”. This is a striking artistic statement considering that many of the ethnographic filmmakers against whose colonial gaze Mbakam’s oeuvre openly resists often rely on a similar equation between seeing and collecting, noticing and categorizing. It seems, however, that organizing means something entirely different for Mbakam. It involves her minimalism at the level of the frame: no more than one or two set pieces for an image; a pair of yellow shoes or a bolt of purple fabric. As we watch the film, we witness both the rigid codes of narrative storytelling and the stalking predation involved in documentary filmmaking gradually relax. We watch the camera divest itself from the threat of its own gaze. The camera is no longer the evil eye of Mambar’s scary white mannequin, but the amulet that protects her against it; it is another eye, one that incites the viewer to look elsewhere, to notice differently. Mambar Pierrette teaches us that the task of organizing reality is about developing the trust to occasionally let it out of sight."

(from the introduction to the film by Zeynep Aygun, graduate student in Comparative Literature)