Exclusive: Director/Writer Ekwa Msangi and Actress Jayme Lawson Talk ‘Farewell Amor’

Now available in select theaters, digital, and cable VOD is Farewell Amor, written and directed by Ekwa Msangi and starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (“The Chi”), Zainab Jah (False Positive), Jayme Lawson (The Batman), Nana Mensah (Beasts of No Nation), Joie Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), and Marcus Scribner (“Blackish”).

Produced by Huriyyah Muhammad, Sam Bisbee, and Josh Penn, the film had its premiered at the this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

After 17 years apart, Angolan immigrant Walter is joined in the U.S. by his wife and teen daughter. Now absolute strangers sharing a one bedroom Brooklyn apartment, they struggle to overcome the emotional distance between them. Walter is trying to let go of a previous relationship while his wife Esther struggles with a new country, culture and a husband who seems distant. Their daughter Sylvia is a dancer just like her father, and while she also finds her new life difficult, she bravely starts to explore the city and show herself through dance. The film is both a universal immigrant story and the unique perspective of three characters bound together by history and hope. It is an intimate and deeply personal look at an inter-generational tale that has defined America since its inception.

BlackFilmandTV.com recently spoke with Msangi on her feature film debut and Lawson, who got this role shortly after graduating Juilliard School and will next be seen opposite Robert Pattison in The Batman.

How did this story come about? I understand it from a personal background.

Ekwa Msangi: It's a story that was inspired by the relationship of an aunt and uncle of mine, who got married in the mid 90s, in Tanzania. Soon after their wedding, my uncle got a student visa to come to the US came with every intention of bringing my aunt and cousin right behind him. To date, they have been stuck in this never ending cycle of visa applications and rejections and applications and rejections. Having watched their lives change over the years, and how their lives have had to change in order to remain hopeful that they will one day be reunited, I was inspired by the what if story. What if the visa was no longer the issue and my aunt show up with the cousin? Where does one begin at that point?

Were you already a filmmaker or was this was going to be your first project?

Ekwa Msangi: Well, this is my first feature project. I've made several films, short films and TV series before this. It's not only my first feature, but it was my first my debut into a wider film community. Most of my work has been into a lot of regional festivals, the African Film Festival, not only here in New York, but all over the country and continent and that kind of thing. So I feel like I've been speaking mostly to a particular audience. This is the first time that I got to speak to a much wider audience. A whiter audience as well. It's really, really exciting to be able to expand that.

How did this come about for you, Jayme? Was this something that came across your team? Did you audition for it? 

Jayme Lawson: I auditioned. The casting director, Rebecca, saw me in a showcase at school and brought me in just for a general meeting and said, "Hey, I have this project coming up and I’m about a start casting. Are you familiar with step or any African dialects? I'm like,”Yeah, of course.” Totally bluffing, because I just wanted to get in the room and audition. As she began to send in the materials, I was like, "Oh, this is a lot." Then stepping in and auditioning that way. I auditioned from May through June. That was the callback process. Then finding out later in the summer, that I'd have get to be a part of this film.

Did you work on the dialect?

Jayme Lawson: Oh, yeah. Even for the audition, I was like, "Okay, I know I'm not going to master it for this audition, but at least learn and dissect and figure out what it is." Because at first, I didn't know that it was Portuguese based. That's very difficult. I was trying to train my ear for that. Then they provided a dialect coach leading up into the film to really get us hunkered down and make sure that we sound like we really were from Angola. There was a lot of support and help to make that happen. 

This film has three different layers, because you're telling three different perspectives from the father, the mother, and the daughter. Was it challenging putting this together, as far as giving an equal opportunity, as opposed to not centering it on just one person, but all three of them?

Ekwa Msangi: It was a challenge. It was a very intense writing experience. I had a lot of mentorship and a lot of support. A lot of people reading drafts and giving feedback over the year and a half that I worked on the script. I was just fascinated by that idea that this family that's all experiencing the one event. From the outside one would just assume like they're all happy, and this is all great for everybody. Everyone's wonderful, and not to say that it wasn't wonderful, but it's way deeper than that. Each person is having a very specific experience of the same event based off of their own personal baggage that they've shown up with.

I just felt like I would be doing a disservice to any one of them because there’s ways in films depicting African and African American people in particular. We tend to dismiss people with, "Oh, this guy must be a terrible person because he's having an affair. She’s just a moody teenager because that's what teenagers do, or she's just a Holy Roller, because she has nothing better to do with her life." I didn't want any of them to be dismissed, and I didn't want their experiences to be dismissed, because it's so much more complicated.

Besides your personal background to creating this story, did you do any further research to other people going through similar circumstances?

Ekwa Msangi: I didn't spend much time focusing on the time spent at the lawyers office, or filling up forms, or, the immigration aspect of it because I think it affects different people differently. Depending on if you're coming from a war country, if you are seeking asylum, if you are just trying to come and visit and then change into something, if you're coming as a fiance, there's so many categories to it, that, and then it also changes so much, depending on what our political situation is, and who's in charge. I wanted the story to be a little bit more evergreen, not necessarily focusing on the specifics of why these people had such a hard time getting, filling out this particular form, but just the difficulties in general.

The immigration and visa application is one layer of difficulties. But then it's the money to buy the plane tickets, and to support them while they're here. When they do, people don't just get work permits right away. Even if they had work permits, there are people where English isn't their first language. There’s so many human aspects to having to make that transition to be here. In order to prepare oneself, enough for Walter’s character to receive his family, he probably have to save up a whole bunch of money and set up a certain type of home and figure out where the schools are, and blah, blah, blah, blah, That could be a whole series of what that process is, but just wanting to hone in and focus on the human aspect that they're dealing with, to give voice to everything else.

Jayme, how did work with Ekwa to define your character?

Jayme Lawson: Most of it was on the page, if not all of it right. The thing that drew me to the script in the first place was this aspect of here's this man that she hasn't seen since she was a baby, who has been absent all of her life yet. He has to be revered in such a way because he is fighting for them to come to America. That's a lot as a teenager to try and process your father not being there. You spent all of your childhood, your adolescence and you're going into your womanhood and he hasn't been physically present.

But yet you are supposed to love and you're supposed to think of him as this hero, right? How do you reckon with what you're supposed to feel versus what you really feel. And then what happens when I get to meet him for the first time, and all the mixed emotions and, seeing how he interacts with my mother. All of that it's a lot to process and then add on that she's 17. She's in a new country. She’s in a new school and English isn't her first first language. That's just a lot. It's overwhelming. That was all on the page. So that was easy to to dive into. Ekwa wrote it so that she could take the backseat and observe her mother, her father, her environment, her surroundings, so that she can begin to find her place. How exciting it is when we get to see her in, in dance fully be as Sylvia. We get those little bursts, those glimpses of what we imagined she was prior to coming to America.

How was working with the cast?

Jayme Lawson: Well, working with the cast was a pure dream. The first week or so of filming, it was me and Ntare and I was just in awe. My character really was a gift because Sylvia is observing so much in me, as Jamie who's trying to figure out how to merge Theatre and Film, I'm just watching Ntare work with the camera and stealing from him, picking up from him just how that relationship with the camera goes. Then working with Zainab. It was similar working with her. It was a gift working with this cast, and this crew. It made my job a lot easier when you have everybody there that's so supportive, and that you can really work off of and steal from. It just made a really great experience.

Ekwa, can you talk about doing your first feature project and stay composed?

Ekwa Msangi: I had a wonderful team. I really truly had a wonderful team that I worked with, starting with my producing partner, Huriyyah Muhammad, who I've worked with for several years already on some of the shorts, and we did a web series together and a few other projects. She had produced some features before, but this was my first feature. There was something that was very important about our working relationship and how we get along as partners, and collaborators that helped to bring in everybody else who came on as our investors as our co producers. Because they were able to trust us and trust that we could get the job done, which was incredible. Just the hunger and the excitement of we're starting to get some footage, and getting our foot in the door. We got into a number of development programs over 2018 while we were pitching the project and writing the scripts and sharing those drafts of the script back and forth and her asking me all these questions and those kinds of things. Then raising the money and explaining the story to people that it's dance movie, but not really a dance movie. 

We had a short prequel film that we had shot previously that was a calling card that was helpful for people to see a little bit about how the vision that we had. So that was all helpful. We basically just spent a year, and they have getting allies, getting a support team, getting our people behind us. That carried us through the project, through production and through into post production when we're looking for music. Having worked in independent film for a long time in New York, not only were we able to draw from our community, Huriyyah is a founder of a black TV and film collective here in New York. Those people came and had our back, but also just being resourceful, like knowing how to chat up the guy at the bodega,for all of our locations, those were all personal favors.For the department location, we had a lot of money compared to other projects we've done. But for New York Film, it wasn't that much money.

So we spent about seven months, Huriyyah in particular spent about seven months, just handing out flyers. Everyone in particular neighborhoods, we knew the apartments had to be about the size that we could shoot in and went asking people to, “Do you want to be part of a film? Great, let us use your apartment, and we'll put you in an Airbnb." We did it that way. It was a little bit of a grassroots filmmaking style that we were able to lean in on our community, on our indie film community, who really came and had our back. It's been really wonderful to be able to celebrate with them, because we were able to get to the finish line and, and beyond until the film as well. So very excited about that.