“A film about the stories we tell ourselves and others to make our existence in an increasingly complex and burning world easier.”

At its heart, La maison du vent (House of the Wind) is a film about the stories we tell ourselves and others to make our existence in an increasingly complex and burning world easier. From interpersonal relationships to questions of national belonging, one is never simply a person, a son, a daughter, a man, a woman, a citizen, or an immigrant. Yet the stories we tell to validate these categories can take a considerable toll on those who find themselves forced to inhabit them.

This is seen in the film through Josette, a lonely 75-year-old woman in Yaoundé, Cameroon, who spends her days trying to complete a house that she believes will allow her children, who live in Europe, to return home. Nothing can stop her from pursuing the dream of reuniting her family, from the lack of proper identification documents to the need to take out a loan through the women’s support group she belongs to, at absurdly high interest rates. In one of the film’s key scenes, the women participate in an auction where whoever agrees to pay the highest interest rate receives the loan. She is a mother, after all, and there is seemingly no effort she would not make for her children. So she slowly but surely oversees the construction of the house, attends meetings of her support group, and, in between all of this, constantly calls her children to update them on their future home.

Again, La maison du vent seems to be more interested in the ways its characters tell the stories of their own lives than in simply portraying a mother trying to reunite with her children. It is about how each of these people perceives, and narrates, what they are going through differently. Josette calls her children, shows them the construction, asks them to choose the colors of the tiles, and anxiously waits for a definitive date of their eventual arrival. Her children, however, don’t seem particularly interested in going back home. What is never openly acknowledged is that she does not have the means to finish the construction, and even if she did, neither the house nor its absence is what prevents her children from returning. In the same way, her children constantly postpone the date: next month, perhaps the month after, perhaps when they have saved more money; they’d rather not tell her the truth.

Stories are told to distract these characters from the problem that lies before them: that their plans for the future might not overlap. Josette’s children do not have a future in Cameroon, and as for her, no matter how loudly you love someone, it is pointless if they are not listening. Also, she never acknowledges Europe as a possibility for herself; whatever future she may still have, she imagines it in Africa, rooted in the place she has always called home.

Then, by the whims of fate, she meets Sarah, a young woman from her neighborhood who does not see eye to eye with her own family despite the fact that, unlike Josette’s children, they all live in the region. This is especially true when the subject is her love life. Thus, as Josette looks for her children, Sarah looks for new parents, even if only for a while, because she needs to introduce her French fiancé to her family. The two women befriend each other, and Sarah tries to teach Josette about her life, her important moments, and her childhood memories, because any mother would have stories to tell about her children.

Through this unexpected bond, both women can not only craft a temporary solution to their lifelong problems, but also give each other some room to simply exist and breathe without the obligation to tell stories, to find excuses for their behavior or that of their loved ones. They know that theirs is a relationship of mutual help; that much is clear. It is perhaps no surprise then that the film’s single most tender moment comes when the two women are at a bar, singing karaoke. For a brief moment, everything that troubles them is suspended.

One of La maison du vent’s central questions is not simply how these characters live their lives, but how much of their existence is shaped, like Josette’s future house, to make room for other people’s needs and presence. It is a paradox of our lives: as time passes, there seems to be less and less time or room for others, and yet there is nothing else we can give to those we care about. Something Josette knows well, and something represented in the film by the grim sight of the corpse of an old man, already rotting, being taken away only after the smell begins to bother the neighbors. No one missed him. No child, no friend, claimed his body.

Yanghu focuses his film not only on Josette and Sarah’s bond and their respective family relationships, but also on Cameroon’s broader political circumstances. Presidential debates are constantly seen and heard on television and radio, and despite being described as a shameful “comedic sketch”, something that perhaps unites us all across the globe, there is a recurring topic that candidates discuss regardless of their ideological background. This subject lies at the heart of La maison du vent: the possibility, or impossibility, of building a future in the country. Why, then, would young immigrants return to the country? What are the stories being told about Cameroon? By their families, by the press, in Africa or in Europe? Is there a way to convince them to come back?

So time passes, and for Sarah, Josette, and their families, life’s hardest lesson is learned: no one can promise that there will be more time. And no matter how big the new house is, it still seems too small for the weight of every absence, for memories that never actually happened. For the past can offer comfort, but it cannot give back what was never lived.

Eventually, Josette finds herself silent, if only for a moment, with no more stories left to tell. The house stands empty, filled only by the wind. Then, almost like a dream, or rather a nightmare, she finds herself at an airport, waiting to receive the body of one of her sons. Death has brought him back home after all. A dead son is a son without a future, and so he returns to be buried in a country whose own future remains uncertain, torn apart by the weight of its colonial past and the turmoil of its political present.

Perhaps this is what the house in La maison du vent ultimately comes to represent: not a home, but an attempt to give permanence to things that refuse to remain. Josette builds walls against absence, while Sarah constructs temporary versions of the family she wishes she had. Yet neither architecture nor affection can make time stand still, nor can the stories we tell ourselves turn longing into a shared future. The house may eventually be finished, but what it was meant to contain has already begun to disappear. Like the wind that gives the film its title, some things can be felt, remembered, and desperately held onto, but never truly possessed.