'Delphine's Prayers' & 'Ten Skies' at Open City 2021

Manuela Lazić writes about two of the films that made the biggest impact on her at the 2021 Open City Documentary Festival in London

by Manuela Lazić

Delphine's Prayers / Les prières de Delphine (Rosine Mbakam, 2021, Belgium/Cameroon, 90’, digital)

Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam’s documentary Delphine’s Prayers offers a moment of storytelling in its purest form. Delphine is a Cameroonian woman sitting in front of the director’s camera and telling her the story of how she got to this place, a house in Belgium where she is lying in bed, sick with what looks like a cold. Although she takes breaks when her emotions get too overwhelming, Delphine insists on how important it is for her to tell that painful story. She believes, like the filmmaker, in the power of sharing personal accounts with the world; she sees her difficult trajectory as something not to keep for herself in shame, but rather as a tale of which she was the unlucky participant, and that, if shared widely, could prevent other women from suffering the same fate.