Credit: Bruce Francis Cole/Sundance Institute
Farewell Amor begins with a hello: Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), an Angolan immigrant living in New York City, greets his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) at the airport. After 17 years apart, his family has come to join him in the U.S.
Seventeen years is a long time, though, and none of them are the same as when they parted. Each harbors a private devotion, developed in the intervening years, that belongs only to themselves and threatens the fragile stability of their freshly reunited family. Walter can’t get over his ex-girlfriend, whose mail still comes to his one-bedroom apartment and whose fragrance lingers on a set of sheets he hides in a closet. Esther has become fanatically religious and clings that much harder to her Christianity sometimes with demonstrations of devoutness that materially hurt her husband and daughter amid the emotional chaos of displacement.