Ekwa Msangi makes her feature film debut with a story about family and the ties that bind. Dealing with an African family and their immigration to New York City, Msangi delivers a story of cultural specificity that builds on family dynamics and ideas of home, to deliver a story that anyone one of us who has been a husband, a wife, a father, mother or a child can find something within.
Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is an Angolan immigrant who has been living in New York ever since being exiled from his home country 17 years ago. After a long drawn out process, his family is finally joining him. With the arrival of his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), the three of them begin to live all together for the first time in a small one bedroom apartment. As they become more aware of each other’s differences, their individual resolve is put to the test as they begin to discover who each other are, with some answers proving harder to deal with than others.
Farewell Amor uses a triptych approach to its storytelling, focusing on Walter, Esther and Sylvia’s individual experiences as they start to get to know each other. Each one of them is faced with their own unique challenges involving their identity and how they want to live their lives in America. For Walter, he has lived in this foreign country for 17 years, largely by himself trying to establish income and a place in the community. Now that the daughter he barely knows and the wife he hasn’t seen in 17 years have entered the mix, that life he’s established may not be compatible anymore.
For Esther, her devout Christian belief proves to be both alienating to her husband and her daughter, leaving her adrift from the church back home where she had created a community for herself. Meanwhile, Sylvia has to find a way to navigate an American High School as the new kid from a different country, but soon finds a path to expression through dance.
The three distinct story sections largely follow a chronological order, and give each member of the family their own personal challenges, making for a very well balanced and empathetic immigrant experience. While some of their personal interests cross over, there are some divides between all three of them that prove hard to reconcile and understand, particularly when it comes to Walter’s suspected infidelity within their 17 years apart and Esther’s often rigid beliefs.
Farewell Amor is very much about how difficult such an experience would be to navigate. Becoming a family after 17 years apart is hard to imagine, and that anxiety and fear does seep into Walter, Esther and Sylvia’s lives. What we are witnessing is the most difficult, most cautious, and ultimately most emotional moments in a family trying to see if they can work. There is the pressure of becoming a part of a new country, but also the added issue of effectively forging a new family. The weight of that pressure is felt throughout all three stories of these people who are only doing their best to figure it all out. But even when moments seem like they reach a point of no return, this is still a film that is about a prevailing sense of hope more than it is of a family falling apart before he has come together.
Through music, the expression of dance and simple communication, Msangi is keen to demonstrate that the clouds will break and everything will become clear one day. While all their problems aren’t solved by the end, Msangi aims to leave you with a feeling that things could work, things could get better, allowing for this to be a story of hope and not one entirely characterised by dysfunction. It is a very moving story that touches on a great deal of the American immigrant experience, sometimes spreading itself a little too thin. But thanks to the three performances at its focus, the film remains one that wears its heart on its sleeve throughout. It crafts an unconventional story about family, but one we can all learn something from when it comes to addressing how we can find connection with those in our family we disagree with, even if those differences seem too hard to overcome.
Farewell Amor
Summary
A very moving story that touches on a great deal of the American immigrant experience.
