Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu has lived in France for twenty years. He became a French citizen several years ago. Cameroon does not recognise dual nationality, so the Cameroonian filmmaker is no longer Cameroonian on his official papers.
His first feature returns to the country the document says he has left.
La Maison du Vent, screening in the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival, is built around an eighty-year-old woman living alone in Yaoundé while all six of her children have moved abroad. She encourages them to build houses in Cameroon, hoping concrete, rooms and unfinished family plans will eventually pull them home.
The woman is played by Josette Kwanya, Yanghu’s late mother. The story is inspired by her life.
This is a RollCallAfrica profile drawn from Yanghu’s official director’s statement, the film’s public production record and its Venice presentation. It is not a reproduction of another publication’s interview.
“In My Script as in Life, Josette Is My Mother”
Yanghu’s statement for Venice is unusually direct. “In my script as in life, Josette is my mother,” he writes. Like the character, his mother had six children. Like the family in the film, the children settled mainly in Europe while she remained in their large house in Yaoundé.
He remembers her moving through the building “like a guardian of the family archives,” holding on to the belief that the children would return to their rooms and the personalised plates waiting for them.
The film’s emotional engine is not simply migration. It is the architecture migration leaves behind.
A family house can be an investment, evidence of achievement, a retirement plan and a promise to return. It can also become a monument to people who visit through a phone screen. Josette’s building project is an attempt to make return physical. If the children own rooms, perhaps distance will remain temporary.
The Country on the Paper and the Country in the Work
Yanghu’s nationality statement makes the film more than an autobiographical family drama. It places him inside a legal contradiction shared by many African artists whose work is rooted in countries that no longer recognise them in the same way.
On paper, he is French. In the film, Yaoundé is not an exotic location or a recovered memory. It is the centre of the family’s moral world. The children abroad are the absent figures. The mother who stayed is the person through whom departure must be understood.
The production itself crosses Cameroon, Benin, France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Cameroon’s Horizons d’Afrique leads the credited production alongside La Mansarde Cinéma, Steel Fish Pictures and Benin’s Merveilles Production, with support from the Red Sea Fund and Doha Film Institute. Celluloid Dreams handles world sales.
That structure mirrors a recurring fact of African filmmaking: the story may return home while the financing route travels widely.
READ ALSO: The missing promise inside Africa’s film-finance ambition is that the film will actually be finished.
His Mother Is Not Used as Evidence
The most delicate fact about La Maison du Vent is that Josette Kwanya is both inspiration and performer. A filmmaker putting a parent on screen can easily turn intimacy into a claim of authenticity: believe this story because the real person is standing before the camera.
Yanghu’s stated purpose is narrower and more personal. He wants to evoke his mother’s loneliness. That choice shifts attention away from migration as a statistic and towards the repeated domestic acts that distance changes: charging a phone, maintaining rooms, supervising construction, waiting for visits and deciding how often to call without making children feel guilty.
The film gives Josette another relationship through Sarah, a younger woman from the neighbourhood who asks her to pretend to be her mother. Their arrangement turns the empty family role into something that can be renegotiated. Blood created Josette’s original household. Absence creates space for a second one.
A Different Migration Story
African migration films commonly follow the person who leaves: the journey, the border, the new city, the humiliation, the reinvention. La Maison du Vent looks in the opposite direction. Its central character stays still while the family map changes around her.
That viewpoint does not romanticise staying. Josette is lonely, economically stretched and dependent on money and promises travelling from abroad. Nor does it reduce the children to villains. Diaspora life creates obligations in both directions. The person abroad is expected to finance the house; the person at home is expected to keep the idea of home intact.
READ ALSO: African cinema’s overlooked language budget determines how far a story can travel across the continent.
What Venice Is Recognising
Venice is recognising a debut feature with a six-country production structure and an international sales company. Those are the industry facts. The artistic fact is smaller and harder to manufacture: a filmmaker used his first feature to return to the woman who remained in the house after he left.
The official record now calls Yanghu French. The film does not waste time arguing with the document. It answers with Yaoundé, his mother’s face, a family house and the rooms that migration could not empty of expectation.
RollCallAfrica profile compiled from the Venice International Film Festival’s official programme and director’s statement, the film’s published production credits and publicly available career records. Direct quotations are taken only from Yanghu’s official festival statement.
