DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

When I see Africans represented by the West, it’s always in the position of victims. But that’s not what I saw in my family—even if they were struggling with hard situations, they were not victims. They were joyful and strong, and they wanted to do things, share things. My goal when I started to make cinema was to give back power to those people, the power to really tell their stories.

I didn’t want to tell the story of Pierrette the way the West would, I wanted to tell it the way we live it. When it’s hard, Pierrette takes a beer and dances. I do the same thing. I wanted to show the character in the context of my reality. Poverty is my reality. It is the way I film it and represent it that is important and different. I am not ashamed of my reality: I grew up in the same neighborhood as Pierrette. I don’t want to arrange a new reality in order to show “positive” images of Africa. This is a positive image, because I’ve assumed it and represented it. I frame my reality how I see it, not how the West wants it to be.

The documentary aspect is the life of Pierrette, while the political thread in the film is fiction. 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 that’s not fully visible, but it’s there. Fiction helped me point that out. But I didn’t want fiction to take power from the life of Pierrette—to overpower the cinema that’s already in the lives of people. So that’s the balance.