“Leaving” one day, with return – Liberation

In a documentary in the form of a plea for the emotional and economic reinvestment of the African continent, the Cameroonian Mary-Noël Niba collects the testimonies of people who, after having left her for Europe, have decided to return to their country.

In this standardized documentary, the Cameroonian director Mary-Noël Niba presents several facets of the question of return, through a succession of stories. Starting from the journey of Guy Roméo, a young rapper who took the long road from exile in Cameroon to Marseille to meet his idol, rapper Mac Tyer, the film – as if to give advice to his young hero – then takes the opposite route, which has been told less often: it collects the stories of four people who have decided to return home – to Cameroon and Senegal – after an exile in Europe. They and they recount the difficulties of leaving and arriving in unknown countries (France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy), very different from their idealized images, the various systems that take advantage, on the spot, of the fragility of their situations, the fear of failure and its shame, which dissuades the desire to return, the difficult readjustment of the return. To leave ? is a plea for this return, a call for reinvestment, affective and economic, in the native country and continent, launched from a double point of view, on both sides of the question of the title, the author herself living in Paris where she works at the Cameroon Embassy. If this discourse, intended to exhort by example, takes precedence over the concrete presentation of the lives evoked, and forces the editing to oversignify, to stick to a comparative generality, the film nevertheless manages to draw the contours and the urgency of the subject – or of the verb – that it clears.