Writer-director Ekwa Msangi's debut feature Farewell Amor premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and was released in December by IFC Films. Msangi describes the intervening months as a roller coaster, marked as they were by a global pandemic, social unrest and political turmoil.
It's been such an awkward year, she says. But it's also felt very hopeful in terms of changing government and the Black Lives Matter movement and things that people are not willing to tolerate any longer. That includes not having our voices heard in the way they should be. Even at Sundance, it felt like we were moving into a new era, where people are willing to take us more seriously than they have in the past.
Farewell Amor begins at JFK Airport, as Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is reunited with his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah), and daughter, Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), for the first time since he arrived in New York City, 17 years earlier, from Angola. Walter came to the United States determined to provide a new start for his family following the end of the decades-long Angolan Civil War, but after so much time apart, they may as well be meeting one another for the first time.
Behind the scenes, Msangi's collaborators included producer Huriyyah Muhammad and cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole. The filmmakers sourced their camera and lens package from Panavision New York through the use of Panavision's New Filmmaker Program grant. I've used that grant several times, all for first-time feature filmmakers, Cole says. One of the beautiful things about Panavision is that independent filmmakers have access to all these tools that the bigger studio projects are using. I'm always appreciative of getting an opportunity to work with Panavision.
Panavision recently connected with Msangi and Cole for a joint call over Zoom to discuss the visual language they crafted for the movie. I'm so pleased with what we were able to do with the film, and Bruce is so masterful in his work, Msangi says. To see him getting the love that he has been is so great.
Writer-director Ekwa Msangi and cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole.
Panavision: When did the two of you begin to discuss Farewell Amor?
Ekwa Msangi: Preproduction started on a Monday, and we met the Thursday before. We were initially slated to work with a different DP who had to drop out at the last minute, but he said, Don't worry, I'm going to introduce you to someone good.' I think that was Tuesday, Bruce read the script on Wednesday, and then we spoke for the first time on Thursday. I don't know if I told you this, Bruce, but one of your references was a good friend. We had gone to school together, and when I called, she said, Just hang up the phone and hire him immediately it's the best thing you'll ever do in your life!' And I was like, Okay, I guess I will!'
Bruce Francis Cole: I am so appreciative of Jackie Stone's referral I'm sure that's who that was!
Msangi: How can you tell? [Laughs.] So we took a chance on each other because Bruce didn't know us, either. We started preproduction, and we spent that whole week, sunup to sundown, mapping out the entire film and talking through what I saw, what I felt, and what was important to me about the story.
Cole: Like Ekwa said, I interviewed on Thursday, found out on Friday, was on a plane by Sunday, hit the production office on Monday morning, and we had two weeks before we shot the film. [Laughs.] We share a lot of the same friends, though, and we both were familiar with the aesthetic of indie and foreign cinema, so in terms of language and shorthand, it wasn't a stretch.
Were there any particular films that inspired your approach?
Msangi: We looked at Andrew Dosunmu's work, like Mother of George, quite a bit because he's an African filmmaker telling stories about Africans in New York. And Bruce has a much bigger vocabulary as far as artwork and cinematographers and films. We ended up talking about Wong Kar-Wai and who else?
Cole: You had a really cool reference, the dance film
Msangi: La Tropical, a Cuban dance film. That's true.
Cole: Coming from the continent of Africa and being very familiar with African cinema, Ekwa had a lot of references that we pulled from in terms of the feeling and the rhythm of the culture, and what our characters were leaving behind, and what they were trying to rescue here in America. The semba dance scene was a big motif for the film in terms of how the characters move within a space and with one another. We wanted to mimic that rhythm throughout different parts of the film.
There are a couple scenes in the film and I don't think Ekwa even knows this where I was placing very particular items in certain places of the frame to call back to Ming-liang Tsai's film What Time Is It There? With a lot of his films, it's dramatic material, but you don't necessarily experience it with a lot of editing. It's a lot of still frames with characters moving in frame. We were inspired by that, and then filmmakers like Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay and a lot of contemporary coming-of-age films.
What led you to frame for the 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio?
Cole: We wanted to play the background mise-en-sc ne because the story isn't just about the characters. It's actually about the characters within an environment within the small apartment, within New York City. We knew we always wanted the setting in the background to be a part of the characters' lives. I think it was instinctual, just knowing that the background is supposed to be a fourth character in the film.
The film is structured as a series of chapters, one for each of the three main characters, and each is demarcated by its own visual language in regard to the camerawork. Wh
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Writer-director Ekwa Msangi's debut feature Farewell Amor premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and was released in December by IFC Films. Msangi describes the intervening months as a roller coaster, marked as they were by a global pandemic, social unrest and political turmoil.
