I come from the suburbs myself in Africa, so there’s a lot of codes that are very similar. By going to Capotillo, we had the opportunity to focus on a different side of what everybody’s used to seeing and we tried to portray them with dignity and seeing only the beauty of it.Ĭlarisse, I imagine you were immersed in Capotillo already, but did this put you in touch in a greater way with the Dominican Republic?Ĭlarisse Albrecht: Well, I’ve been living in the Dominican Republic for many years now and I was already a bit familiar with this neighborhood. Capotillo was one of those neighborhoods that you knew was very violent at times and very poor, but at the same time, you’d find the nicest people, the people that would take care of you like you were family, and I I wanted to tell their stories I felt the media only portrayed the wrong side of the neighborhood. When I started to explore the urban music world in the Dominican Republic, I started to go to these places. Ivan Herrera: I grew up surfing in a neighborhood that was life as Capotillo because it was a neighborhood away from the center of the city of Santo Domingo where you have many realities happening at the same time. How did this come about? I understand it really grew out of this neighborhood of Capotillo. Recently Albrecht and Herrera made the trip to Los Angeles to talk about how they wanted to shine a light on a side of their home county that few outside of it often get to see, capturing the vibrant energy of the neighborhood they were filming in and how they pieced the film together during the pandemic to become a hit with audiences once the world started opening up again. The film, which premiered at SXSW last year, has been picking up admirers around the world ever since, including the fine folks at ARRAY who recently set up a release at Netflix with the film in Oscar contention as the official selection of the Dominican Republic. Even if “Bantú Mama” is light on its toes as a narrative, a fleet-footed drama as energetic as its youthful cast awash in the bold colors of its setting, it carries the weight of history that its characters are conscious of without necessarily being fully cognizant of it, knowing there’s a piece of themselves that they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to understand and finding in one another a way to fill the void. While Emma can’t leave the house for fear of being found out, she starts to make a home for the kids back in their small abode, sharing the food she learned to cook from her own mother and other traditions that provide some comfort to all of them, even though for Emma, there’s also a slight sense of unease when she yearns to know more about her ancestral home of Senegal. But when a transport goes bad, there is an even greater surprise awaiting her when she is found clinging to life in the ocean by a trio of kids (Euris Javier, Arturo Perez and Scarlet Reyes) who can relate to being adrift when their father was locked up and their mother died, leaving them to fend for themselves. Bearing traces of their own cultural roots, the film illuminates the beauty of people of different backgrounds meshing as a family when Emma (Albrecht), a woman of French-African origins is lured to the DR with the promise of easy money, smuggling bags that she doesn’t know what’s inside. However, this isn’t all that much an inconvenience when two would seem to welcome any opportunity to add flavor to their films, even if it poses the threat of a bump on the head, and in fact, it likely contributes to why such sweetness emerges from “Bantú Mama,” which the partners, both professionally and personally, co-wrote for Herrera to direct and Albrecht to star in.
“Sometimes the mangoes fall and it’s like wait, bang!” “It’s crazy,” says Herrera, noting the occasional workplace hazard.
“Yeah, we make juice, but sometimes it’s dangerous.” “This is how we like to call ourselves when we write together because we literally write under a mango tree in the garden,” says Albrecht of finding a screenwriters’ haven like no other in the Dominican Republic. When Clarisse Albrecht and Ivan Herrera collaborate on something together, their friends and colleagues know just where they’ll be, to the point that they’ll refer to any joint projects as “Under the Mango Tree.”
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