101 min | NR | December 11, 2020 | IFC Films
Ekwa Msangi reunites an Angolan immigrant with the wife and daughter he left behind seventeen years ago. They share a Brooklyn apartment and almost nothing else. The reunion is the easy part.
Walter drives a cab in Brooklyn. He left Angola seventeen years ago and has waited that long for his wife and daughter to join him. Esther and Sylvia finally arrive, and the three of them crowd into a one-bedroom apartment. They are a family on paper and strangers in fact. Ekwa Msangi builds the film around the distance between the people they were when they parted and the people that time and exile have made them.
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine plays Walter with a stillness that reads as patience and hides a guilt he cannot speak. He spent the separation building a life that now has no room in it. Zainab Jah plays Esther as a woman who filled the absence with faith and a church that frowns on the very dancing her daughter lives for. Jah lets the devotion curdle into control without ever raising her voice. Jayme Lawson plays Sylvia, the daughter who barely remembers her father and pours everything she cannot say into dance. Nana Mensah plays Linda, the woman Walter loved while he waited, and gives the affair weight instead of melodrama.
Msangi writes and directs her first feature, and she structures it as a triptych. The same stretch of time unfolds three times, once from Walter, once from Esther, once from Sylvia. A gesture that looks like coldness in one chapter becomes fear or longing when the film returns to it through different eyes. The camera stays close inside the apartment, and the cramped frames press the family against one another with nowhere to hide. The kizomba music that drives Sylvia’s dancing carries the Angola the parents fled and the daughter never knew.
The triptych could read as a gimmick. It does not, because Msangi uses the repetition to prove that nobody in this apartment is the villain the others suspect. Walter, Esther, and Sylvia each act from love, and each wounds the other two anyway. The film resists both the easy reunion and the easy collapse. It trusts dance to carry what dialogue cannot and lets the family find one language they share without translation.