‘House of the Wind’ review: A tender Cameroonian study of solitude and unexpected kinship

Dir. Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu. Cameroon/France/Belgium/Benin/Saudi Arabia/Qatar 2026. 103 mins. 

Artfully combining tenderness with stylistic and narrative sobriety, House of the Wind is an intensely personal feature by French-Cameroonian director Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu. Dedicated to and starring his mother Josette Kwanya, who completed her role before her death in 2024, this is a compelling study of old age, solitude and solidarity between generations, against the backdrop of contemporary economic challenges in the director’s native Cameroon.

Astutely and sensitively challenges the clichés of old age on screen.

Known on the festival circuit for shorts including My Friend Fukushima (2023), Kouemo Yanghu makes a confident feature debut, with a storytelling style that favours brief scenes and elliptical but propulsive editing. And with Kwanya’s quietly magnetic lead performance, this finely tuned drama promises to be one of this year’s most visible African productions following its debut in Venice Horizons.

The setting is Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé, home of 80-year-old widow Josette Tientcheu, aka Mama Josette (Kwanya). She lives alone in a house decorated with photos of her several children, now adults living and working in Europe; as snatches of TV commentary make clear, it is difficult for young Cameroonians to find work at home. Eagerly awaiting the return of her son Benoît, Josette is supervising the construction of a house for him – although quite how the work will be fully paid for is moot.

In a tight spot with her ID card, Josette is helped out by Sarah (Moudjeu Pouadeu), a street-smart young woman who runs a health drink stall. Then Sarah needs a favour in return. Her parents disapprove of her engagement to marry a white Frenchman, Adrien (Adrien Jolivet), who is due to visit. Sarah asks Josette to pose as her mother when Adrien arrives, and the woman soon becomes a fixture in the old woman’s home. 

The resulting complications are very much placed in a specific Cameroonian cultural context – notably in scenes at a women’s mutual-help association, where Josette bids for a hefty loan at an auction. Finding themselves in quandaries, emotional and economic, the two women form a close, if cautious, surrogate mother-daughter relationship, sealed by a song they perform together at a bar in a lovely extended take.        

The film’s spare narrative style and controlled focus on its lead characters perhaps make it closest, in recent African cinema, to the work of Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Kouemo Yanghu is a purposeful storyteller, playing down moments of crisis while sometimes drawing out what might be considered ‘dead time’. One thread that doesn’t entirely feel integrated, however – visually imposing though it is – is the dreamlike evocation of the titular ‘house of the wind’, as it’s named in the end credits: a mansion with airy white interiors, eerily invaded by creeping vines. The imagery invokes themes of impermanence or frustrated hope, but interpretation is left to the viewer. Otherwise, the only questionable rhetorical touch, in a sequence evoking Josette’s isolation, is a passage of score that lapses into excessive lushness, too emphatically hitting the pathos button.

Elsewhere, the film offers a vivid portrait of Yaoundé as a busy city, but one that marginalises older citizens like Josette; Kouemo Yanghu is ruefully critiquing a time in which traditional African codes of respect and care for elders have been eroded by harsh economic necessity. 

Above all, Kouemo Yanghu is blessed with his leads. Pouadeu plays Sarah as a spiky, autonomous, no-nonsense city girl, but makes her increasingly poignant as she reveals her need for support. And the director could hardly have offered his mother a finer gift than her lead role here. With her deadpan, dignified performance, Kwanya may essentially be playing a version of herself, but her intensely characterful presence and downbeat humour set the keynotes for a film that astutely and sensitively challenges the clichés of old age on screen.