Photo : TĂąndor Productions, CC BY-SA 4.0
Rosine Mbakam
Belgium-based documentary maker and director of "Mambar Pierrette"
Born in 1980
Related city : Yaoundé
On screen : Mambar Pierrette (2023)
Who are they?
Rosine Mbakam is a Cameroonian director born in 1980 into a Bamiléké family and raised in Yaoundé. After audiovisual training at the Centro orientamento educativo in Yaoundé, she worked as a camera operator and programme director for the private channel STV, then moved to Brussels in 2007 and graduated from INSAS in 2012. In 2014 she co-founded the company Tùndor Productions.
What made them famous
Her documentaries "Les Deux Visages d'une femme bamiléké" (2016), in which she films her return home and her conversations with her mother, and "Chez Jolie Coiffure" (2018), shot in a hair salon in the Matonge district of Brussels, won awards at many festivals. "Les PriÚres de Delphine" (2021) continued this work. Her first fiction feature, "Mambar Pierrette", a portrait of a Douala seamstress played by her cousin, was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2023.
Key facts
- "Chez Jolie Coiffure" won best documentary at the London Feminist Film Festival in 2018 and the Scam Discovery Award in 2019.
- She teaches at KASK, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.
- "Mambar Pierrette" was released in French cinemas in January 2024 and only had its first public screening in Cameroon in September 2025, at the Institut français in Douala and Yaoundé.