52 Films by Women Vol 5. 45. FAREWELL AMOR (Director: Ekwa Msangi)
Contains spoilers The opening of Farewell Amor is deceptive: a single static shot of people waiting in the Arrivals hall of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Our eyes are drawn to a figure holding a sign in the centre of the frame. However, it isn’t this figure who is important, rather Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), a tall and as we discover soft-spoken Angolan who steps forward from the left of the frame to greet his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), whom he has not seen for seventeen years. While Walter headed to America at the end of the Angola Civil War, Esther and Sylvia migrated to Tanzania (specifically Dar Es Salaam) where Esther found and enthusiastically embraced God. As she hugs her husband, calling him ‘Amor’, she allows her handbag to fall to the ground. Sylvia quickly picks it up and puts it on top of suitcases stacked on a luggage trolley that she is pulling. As Walter, a taxi driver, takes the pair into New York City,...