Iván Herrera follows the characters who live in the poorest community of Santo Domingo, but allows them to overflow with life instead of wallowing in misery.
From the beginning of “Bantú Mama,” the current Oscar nominee for Best International Feature Film from the Dominican Republic, to writer-director Iván Herrera, a brief demonstration of joyful magical realism sums up the film’s thesis about diasporic kinship.
With big smiles painted on their faces, 3 Afro-Dominican siblings – Cuki (Euris Javiel), T. I. N. A (Scarlet Reyes) and $hulo (Arturo Perez) – jump up and down alongside an adult Afro-Pea woman from France, Emma (Clarisse Albrecht), as if they were part of the Maasai other peoples of Kenya. Suddenly, Cuki garments are dressed in turn in the classic garments and accessories of that tribe. For a moment, he and the Maasai are one.
The lunatic drama speaks of the indissoluble ties between Africa and the Caribbean without ever talking about them in didactic terms but, on the contrary, illustrating the link with the daily exchanges between the unforeseen guest and the locals. For example, one morning, the makeshift circle of relatives stores a plate of fried greens or tostones, which reminds Emma of aloko, a West African dish that is also prepared with bananas.
The popularity of their similarities across the oceans surprises Cuki, the youngest, who struggles to see how Emma can be French while identifying with her Bantu heritage. But for T. I. N. A, a confident teenager, there’s no doubt that Emma fits in with them. .
Emma is his mother, at least biologically. But she temporarily assumes a maternal role in this family without adult supervision. She cooks for them and helps Cuki with her homework. that only a loving father figure can. By building their self-esteem with undeniable affirmations, it teaches them to see themselves as more than just their environment.
Arrested after an illicit business gone wrong, Emma lands with the 3 miners in the besieged community of El Capotillo de Santo Domingo (the capital of the country) after a fortuitous accident. Now, his only chance of regaining his life in France is with that of the trio of tacitly followed young people whose mother died while his father was in prison. But Herrera is not interested in presenting just another criminal story as a means of survival for disenfranchised youth in emerging countries.
Although he sets his work in a marginalized network — most commonly populated, at least on screen, by black Dominicans — he and cinematographer Sebastián Cabrera Chelin present sordid representations. The concrete labyrinths of El Capotillo are full of life, whether rapping $hulo and his friends or pirouettes on a motorcycle; People’s lives are not explained through suffering.
Thanks to their portable yet delicately lit design, Cabrera Chelin’s frames involve a seductive force along with a haunting soundscape, which wraps the narrative in an otherworldly air, almost as if implying that this encounter between Emma and the siblings is not simply fortuitous, but is destined to occur and out of their control.
Behind the camera, Albrecht acts as a co-writer, possibly bringing to the story her own stories lived as a French-Cameroonian woman. Like Emma, the actress gives a sober performance. There is an undeniable warmth in the way they interact with children, but also a distance that makes it an enigma for them and for us. There are few references to his afterlife in Europe, but an open sea of odds for his future. the filmmaker may have added a little more facts about Emma without wasting his mysterious attitude. For us, his very resolve to care about drug trafficking would enrich his bow.
Herrera’s young actors act with such a herbal openness to this stranger in their home that it doesn’t take much for the viewer to have fully embraced it. Reyes, who plays T. I. N. A, stands out among them for the maturity of the facts with which she asks for a favor that changes Emma’s life in exchange for her monetary help to leave. The determination in the young performer’s eyes conveys depression and hope.
Just as surreptitiously beneath the surface, the filmmakers tackle the dehumanizing remedy of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, the result of the history between the two former colonies that occupy the island of Hispaniola. The trio of young people immediately assume that any French-speaking black user is an undocumented Haitian citizen. At first, they think Emma is Haitian, and then immigration officials come to the same conclusion.
In its succinct journey, “Bantu Mama” evokes a multitude of illuminating questions about the African diaspora and how the white Western global has distanced it from its excellent beyond and, therefore, from a sense of belonging. Although at first they seem contextless, Herrera and Albrecht come with the film’s shots of the island of Gorée, an island off the coast of Senegal known as a key site of the Atlantic slave industry in later centuries, as if saying that perhaps the house because this surrogate mother and her selected relatives is not the Dominican Republic either. not France, but the African continent.
“Bantu Mama” will be on Netflix on November 17.