Reviewed by Brian Gibson
Sisters in Law. A film by Florence Ayisi & Kim Longinotto Featuring Vera Ngassa & Beatrice Ntuba Cameroon/UK, 2005, 104 minutes, Color, VHS/35mm/Beta/DVD
Currently Screening in the United States and Canada
Sisters in Law opens by introducing one of the feistiest, no-nonsensest action heroes you’re likely to see on screens all year. State prosecutor Vera Ngassa walks into a weathered building, past barred windows and through the padded inner door to her office. This is where she brings abusive husbands and tyrannical guardians to task.
In one case, an aunt who has beaten her six-year-old niece with a coat hanger starts to sob and pleads to Ngassa, “Sister—.” The prosecutor, sitting upright behind her desk, retorts, “Don’t you ‘sister’ me!” and later, after sending the aunt off to custody, calls after her, “Shame!”
Sisters in Law launches us, without any preamble, into the world of Ngassa and court president Beatrice Ntuba, two tough-minded legal advocates for women and children in Kumba Town, Cameroon. The film throws us into the various dramas of Ngassa’s cases, associating the women exclusively with their work, offering no personal background (save for a few amusing scenes where Ngassa, somewhat more tenderly, cross-examines her son).
The downside of this approach is that these women’s world may seem the rule, rather than the exception it surely is in largely patriarchal West Africa. And questions remain: How did the Women’s Lawyers’ Association get started? Why in Kumba Town? Were the cases an unusual series of open-and-shut legal victories?
The other nagging suspicion Sisters in Law raises is the unspoken influence of the camera. When Ntuba begins a verdict with a specious generalization about the acceptability of family beatings in African cultures, or when a board of men decides to grant a Muslim woman a divorce while exhorting her to, “Feel free … . That’s what Cameroon wants!” it’s hard to believe that these judges aren’t playing to their cinematic audience.
Film-festivalgoers’ and juries’ embrace of Kim Longinitto’s and Florence Ayisi’s documentary is easy to understand. The film is permeated with Ngassa’s endearing mix of fierce indignation and relentlessly logical legal attacks in court. And there are many offbeat, hilarious moments.
If Sisters in Law doesn’t really delve into the effectiveness of Ntuba’s harsh sentences, it does expose the mundanity of crime. The rapists and abusers whom Ngassa confronts are remarkably pathetic and banal, from a pedophile in all his sniveling sulkiness to the aunt hollowly pleading for forgiveness from her niece.
Ultimately, it’s the rousing, triumphant spirit of Ngassa’s and Ntuba’s fierce compassion that makes Sisters in Law a qualified success.
Click here to download the Sisters in law media kit
Tags: movie reviewAfrican moviesCameroonAfrica
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Joyce
Posted by: Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang Abunaw | February 21, 2006 at 05:38 PM
A sneak preview of sisters-in-law will take place in New York on March 1, 2006.
Justice Vera Ngassa and Justice Beatrice Ntuba from Cameroon, as well as
Director Kim Longinotto, will be in attendance for a Q&A following the
screening.
This is a sneak preview in advance of the US theatrical release of SISTERS
IN LAW, which premieres at New York's Film Forum for two weeks only April
12-25. Please spread the word and visit www.wmm.com/sistersinlaw for more
information.
Tribeca Screening Room
375 Greenwich Street, New York City
March 1, 2006
7-9pm
LIMITED SEATING
RSVP REQUIRED at [email protected]
Posted by: rachel | February 25, 2006 at 11:56 PM
SISTERS IN LAW IN SAN FRANCISCO
"Sisters in Law”" opens April 28 at the Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa St., San Francisco. $8.50.
(415) 221-8184
www.balboamovies.com
Posted by: Yola | April 09, 2006 at 06:19 PM
New York Times - April 12, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW: MORE ON 'Sisters in Law'
In 'Sisters in Law,' the Wheels of Justice Grind Fine
By NATHAN LEE
Published: April 12, 2006
The women of Kumba Town take no guff, thanks to the clear minds, bright spirits and rock-steady ethics of the "Sisters in Law," Vera Ngassa (a prosecutor) and Beatrice Ntuba (a judge). Warmly assembled by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi, this winning documentary follows them as they nourish grass-roots feminism in a Cameroon village.
Men stupid, cruel or negligent enough to wind up in the courthouse swiftly find their idiot assumptions exposed in the light of constitutional justice: sorry, guy, your wife doesn't have to ask permission to leave the house. Patriarchal arrogance is knocked clean off their hapless mugs as the world's worst alibis crumble before the sisterly smackdown.
The cases are appalling. A pre-pubescent girl is raped and left bleeding. A 6-year-old is beaten with a coat hanger, her body scarred with welts. The wife of a callous, vengeful jerk seeks help divorcing him. Nevertheless, the movie doesn't depress. When the right thing is done, it is uplifting in any context. "Sisters in Law" positively soars.
The movie plays like a cross between Ousmane Sembene's vibrant parable "Moolade" and Raymond Depardon's gripping procedural "The 10th District Court." It's looser than both, and would benefit from some cultural and political background. Committed, in strict vérité, to the here and now, "Sisters in Law" eschews the when and how. I'd happily watch a biographical prequel to this particular slice of life. Who are these women, and can they please take over the world soon?
Sisters in Law
Opens today in Manhattan.
Produced and directed by Kim Longinotto; in English and pidgin, with English subtitles; director of photography, Ms. Longinotto; co-director, Florence Ayisi; edited by Ollie Huddleston; music by D'Gary; released by Women Make Movies. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is not rated.
Posted by: Jade | April 12, 2006 at 11:21 PM
By Nancy Keefe Rhodes - Film reviewer/producer/host for Women's Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM (www.waer.org).
SISTERS IN LAW had its US theatrical opening on April 12 at Film Forum in New York City’s South Village. Opening night featured a Q & A with Longinotto after the 8 p.m. screening, which played to an overflow audience, with some standing in the aisle. SISTERS IN LAW was my fourth movie that day and – therefore counter-intuitively – by far the best.
Shot in mostly poor, mostly Muslim Kumba Township in the southwest corner of Cameroon over three and a half months in 2004, SISTERS IN LAW follows several cases involving women and children plaintiffs through the local justice court. Young Sonita was raped by a neighbor. Amina seeks divorce, fearing her husband will kill her if she’s sent home. Six-year-old Manka bears torso scars from coat-hanger beatings by her custodial aunt. Longinotto profiles prosecutor Vera Ngassa (also a judge and university law professor) and district court judge Beatrice Ntuba as they investigate and resolve these cases.
Both women are entirely clear about the stakes for community and petitioners alike. At several points the camera rests on that universally-recognized scowl of bafflement some men wear when they are thwarted by women for the first time. The opening night audience laughed aloud at those moments, though Longinotto says for her that laughter is more “dark and bleak” than comedic. Speaking by phone last week from Colorado, the filmmaker said those men “didn’t mind being filmed – they didn’t see their behavior as wrong.” She recalled how one seemingly “urbane and educated” fellow acknowledged he beat his wife and added, “But I gave her medicines.”
A handful of positive media reviews in early April paved SISTERS IN LAW's way to Film Forum. This theatrical release follows 120 festival appearances world-wide, with lots of prizes and accolades. Stella Pence, who runs Telluride’s Film Festival, calls it “one of the best documentaries of all times.” But SISTERS IN LAW is destined for classic status more for its women and their solutions than for exposing comfortable and clueless men as cads. The specific quality of justice portrayed here makes SISTERS IN LAW uncommon and instructive. Once, Vera leans over to softly ask a beaten down wife, whose purchase price was a pig – who was not, according to Longinotto, “even at her own wedding” – “Oh, Madame, what shall we do with these two men?”
In another scene, a policewoman attached to the court investigates the child Manka’s family situation. Manka’s aunt claims the girl’s parents live in a countryside village, but then the officer also asks Manka, she reveals her parents are dead – so she is quite at her aunt’s mercy. While Longinotto calls this type of exchange “Vera’s democratic instinct,” any acquaintance with treating abuse would tell you that such direct questions – and believing the answers – also constitute the first intervention on the road to healing trauma.
Longinotto takes the time as well to intersperse several short interludes in which Vera plays with her own son in her office. She attentively talks with him, touches him, teaches him colors and gently corrects his wrong answers, tickles him. Rather than have a narrator intone a list of policy solutions, Longinotto shows us specifically how the new men of Kumba are raised. From Colorado, she said the boy’s name is Moses, and that Vera adopted him when his young mother came to court’s attention because she tried to kill her baby.
Lack of back-story and context crop up as the most common complaint about SISTERS IN LAW. Longinotto and her co-director for this film, International Film School Wales lecturer and native Cameroonian Florence Ayisi, shot in strict cinema verite style. A big fan of narration and context myself, I was surprised to notice that, this time, that complaint simply dropped away for me. Indeed, imposing such conventions would interfere with SISTERS IN LAW's capacity to connect as film. Having watched “practically all” of THE SOPRANOS, Longinotto notes that the HBO series’ viewers don’t expect history or statistics on the Mafia. She herself was aiming for “the power of fiction – the sense of danger and of immediacy and of freshness” that generate identification and emotional connection.
The riveting experience of watching SISTERS IN LAW is one of the more striking arguments for this style of documentary that I have encountered. SISTERS IN LAW is also her third courtroom film and as such makes use of a genre that connects well with film audiences in the West if one’s aim is universality.
...
SISTERS IN LAW's limited theatrical release in the US through the end of May includes San Francisco, Boston, Seattle & Chicago. Check screenings at Women Make Movies’ website, http://www.wmm.com/. Hear Nancy’s interview with Kim Longinotto on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on June 1st at 8 p.m. EST via web-streaming at http://www.waer.org/.
http://moviecrossrhodes.blogspot.com/2006/04/film-review-42-on-sisters-in-law.html
Posted by: Alice | April 27, 2006 at 10:03 PM
Correction - Kumba is not "mostly moslem". It is like saying New York is mostly Chinese because you shot a film in China Town. Kumba is a predominantly Christian town, but Christianity is not what immediately comes to mind as the people's identity.
Posted by: Ngum | April 30, 2006 at 05:14 AM