If You Build It, They Won’t Come: Yanghu Offers Alternate Version to Home Improvement
Working through migration, isolation and the complicated meaning of home, Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu turns his directorial debut into something at once intimate and quietly expansive. Drawing directly from his own family history, Yanghu enlists his mother’s story — and the gravitational pull of his native Cameroon — for a portrait that looks simple on the surface but gradually reveals the emotional fault lines created by distance, absence and the stubborn desire to keep a family together and at it’s core we have Josette Kwanya in one hoot of a performance. Economical in design but emotionally generous, La maison du vent (House of the Wind) becomes a tender, occasionally wry study of the by-products of loneliness — what happens when waiting becomes a way of life, and when the people we want to come home have already made another home somewhere else. Some are looking for a way out. Some are looking for a way in. And some, like Josette, are desperately trying to stop the exodus.
Comically also standing in as an accidental general contractor, this 80-year-old matriarch is busy and yet her loneliness has become almost architectural: she lives alone in the family home in Yaoundé while her children have dispersed across Europe, and schemes to lure them back by encouraging them to build houses in Cameroon. Kwanya gives the role a wonderfully lived-in, sometimes mischievous energy, making Josette both the glue holding the film together and a woman slowly discovering that the family she is fighting to preserve may no longer exist in the form she remembers. The writing is on the wall…so are the picture frames but a different fortune come to those looking for it.
A younger woman from Josette’s neighbourhood initially seems an unlikely companion (Moudjeu Pouadeu), she skims from the top (bank notes, and human connections) and we get vulture vibes, but their relationship gradually takes on the intimacy of a mother-daughter bond. For Josette, Sarah fills a space left vacant by her children. And that is precisely where the relationship becomes dangerous. When Sarah’s French boyfriend Adrien arrives in Yaoundé intending to marry her, Josette sees not a romantic future for Sarah but another person preparing to take someone away from her. She quietly intervenes, driving Adrien out of the picture; when Sarah discovers the betrayal, she leaves Josette too.
Mostly in French, with a generous sprinkling of Bafang, this finely calibrated co-production builds sequence by sequence around Josette’s loneliness, turning her increasingly desperate with the film’s real sting being the daily repetition. Josette spends her life trying to bring people closer and that makes the house itself the film’s most quietly expressive character. It is not merely where Josette lives; it is where she stores her expectations. Every room contains an absent person, every unfinished plan carries the fantasy of reunion. Yanghu understands the cruel paradox at the centre of migration: sometimes the people who leave are not the ones who feel the distance most acutely. It is the person left behind who must live among the evidence of what the family used to be. Cinematographer Eva Sehet offers some luminous outdoor shots which balances well with interiors that work more in the shadows. La maison du vent ultimately becomes less a story about an abandoned mother than a meditation on the impossibility of preserving a family in its original shape. Make sure to watch the end credits for further heartbreak.
Reviewed on September 4th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – Orizzonti. 102 Minutes.
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
