Film Notes: Farewell Amor
by Iona Brandt
USA | 2020 | 95m | 15 tbc
Director: Ekwa Msangi
Starring: Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine
The debut feature by Tanzanian-American writer-director Ekwa Msangi is the story of a family reunited having been torn apart by the war in Angola. Husband and father Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) has been living in New York, and when his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah), and daughter, Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), finally join him, they have to pick up from where they left off after 17 years of separation. When Sylvia enters a dance competition, it gives her an outlet to negotiate the challenges of this strained family relationship. After landing feet first in a new life, the characters must ‘rely on the muscle memory of dance to find their way back “home”’ – Msangi.
Msangi is currently a teacher who empowers African filmmakers all over the world. As a mentor at Maisha Film Lab in Uganda, she describes the challenge of getting her students to look beyond writing narratives that are rooted in the Hollywood rhetoric of a Third World struggle and over-dramatised plots. ‘The pull is for my students to write “issue-driven” films,’ she writes on her website, ‘some with the most non-believable and overly dramatic scenes and plot lines.’ She attributes much of the blame to the NGOs who provide funding, who intend to use the films for education programmes, and so drive the creativity out of filmmaking. She says this means ‘everyone is a caricature and stereotype, every woman is meek and waiting for some male and/or foreign savior to come rescue her from Female Circumcision, Battering Husbands, Evil Aunties, Conniving Neighbors, Fistulas waiting to happen … it’s outrageous.’
Naturally, Msangi’s own film features a more believable narrative. Farewell Amor tells a personal story, inspired by the relationship of her aunt and uncle, who were separated in the mid-’90s and are still awaiting visas to be reunited. The film was released in the wake of Black Lives Matter and is evocative of the continued discrimination and xenophobia Black Americans face in Trump’s America.
However, Msangi does not intend Farewell Amor to be a finger-pointing, political, or ‘immigrant’ film. Immigrants are too often talked about as a ‘burden’ on the state, she told The Upcoming, rather than being thought about ‘as people who bring things to our communities, people who work so hard; and also what they’ve left behind, what they’ve had to do and become in order to even be here.’ She added that New York is the perfect setting for this kind of a story due to its history of diversity. Although Msangi does not speak Portuguese, the language in Angola, she did love Kizomba dancing, a style that originated in the country, and she wanted to overcome language barriers to add these voices to the cultural conversation.
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine described the film to IndieWire as a ‘classic love story … this time, it’s seen through this other lens’. Walter and Esther struggle to unite their idea of love for each other, which they nurtured through their imaginations while apart, and the reality of a relationship that’s been changed by the fact they have separately evolved into different people. Jayme Lawson was impressed by how the script explored the intimacy that can be found in a relationship rekindled. However, the ongoing struggle to overcome the continued sense of separation, despite being back in a shared physical space, is not easy to achieve.
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