Rosine Mbakam
McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking at Harvard Film Archive

The Harvard Film Archive and the Film Study Center welcome Rosine Mbakam as this year’s McMillan-Stewart Fellowship recipient. In addition to screenings at the HFA, including two in-person appearances, Mbakam will be visiting classes, presenting a workshop at the Film Study Center and meeting with other colleagues on campus.

The McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking was established at the Film Study Center in 1997 with a generous gift from Geneviève McMillan in memory of her late friend, Reba Stewart, to support outstanding filmmakers from Africa or the African diaspora.

Mbakam’s expansive, dynamic style has achieved perhaps its most astonishing manifestation in her latest film and first fictive feature, Mambar Pierrette, about the everyday existence and quiet majesty of a Cameroonian woman, played by her cousin. Regarding its narrative elements, the filmmaker notes, “I needed a narrative approach to help me make visible what was invisible in her life. Fiction filmmaking here has a specific purpose. That is, fiction can add to the story I want to tell and give weight to it. It’s not only Pierrette that we see. We see a generation of Cameroonians working under the same difficult conditions. We also see the legacy of what the generation before was thinking. Fiction helped me to give density to the story.”

Rosine Mbakam s affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project White-centricity challenged through co-creation was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.