AIFF 2020: Farewell Amor

What a year this 2020 has been. It seems like everything has been cancelled during this year and unfortunately cinema is no exception to the rule. Since last spring very few new films have been released and with cinemas being kept closed internationally, the future of both businesses and filmmaking is looking quite blurry. However, this did not stop the Athens International Film Festival from taking place both in open-air cinemas as well as online through this page which gave everyone the chance to feel a little normal in this surreal world we've been living in lately. 

    So, the first film we're reviewing is Ekwa Msangi's first feature-length film, Farewell Amor, an intimate glimpse at the life of a family of immigrants who try to adjust to living in New York as well as living with each other. The story starts at the airport, where Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) greets his wife and daughter welcoming them to New York where he's been trying to bring them for the past 17 years. The awkwardness and distance among them is immediately apparent; seeing strangers who should feel like family is extremely difficult to grasp yet the three actors convey the feeling flawlessly.

Farewell Amor is divided into three parts: three different points of view of the same events. First we see Walter who has actually made a new life in New York even though his ultimate goal was always to bring his family with him. Then, we see his daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), a 17-year-old whose whole life has changed by leaving her friends behind in order to go meet a dad she's never actually met. Sylvia has her own dreams and aspirations and she hopes to make them true in the US, however she has to face both her quite traditional and reserved mother as well as the truth about her father's new life which makes her feel an outsider. Finally we follow Esther (Zainab Jah), the mother who so as to remain loyal to the idea of her husband and her family has turned to God and religion, something that has made her closed to new ideas or a life outside of what she considers the norm. She also has to come to terms with the idea that her husband has actually lived a whole life in a new place for 17 years and is not the man she remembers.

Msangi's subtle direction shows the difficulties that these people have to face if they want to salvage whatever family they have; without commenting and without judging she allows the protagonists to make decisions themselves about how they will move forward showing that life cannot be pre-organised and we have to make do with whatever cards are dealt to us. 

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