Farewell Amor
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Heart and Home in Different Places

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​...after living thousands of miles apart for so long, the three find they must discover one another’s strengths, forgive one another’s weaknesses, and bridge cultural and generational divides in order to build a life together. Told in three perspective-shifting chapters that honor the multitude of struggles and emotions that make up the immigrant experience, Farewell Amor is a bittersweet, compassionate evocation of how it feels when your heart and your home are in different places."

Ekwa Msangi

Healing through Dancing:
Muscle-Memory and Hope
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The film tells the story of a family reuniting after years of separation, and despite the emotional and cultural gaps that have grown between them, dance becomes a common language that helps bridge these divides.

A forgetfulness of the body is characteristic of much Western European thought, which too often prioritizes thinking through problems over dancing through them. And yet, sometimes our muscles know more than our minds: they can remember movements that were traumatic but also movements that gave us energy and hope. When we dance, we find ourselves restored in hope, not only for individual well-being but also for hope in our relationships with others. Dancing can have a communal, restorative effect. "Farewell Amor" tells the story.

In "Farewell Amor," the characters find solace and a sense of belonging in the familiar rhythms and movements of dance, which serve as a metaphor for reconnecting with lost parts of themselves and each other. The muscle memory involved in dancing acts as a reservoir of shared experiences and emotions, providing a way for the family to express what words cannot convey.

This portrayal underscores the idea that physical activities, particularly those ingrained through practice and repetition, can anchor us in times of emotional turbulence. Muscle memory retains not just the movements but also the emotions and connections associated with them. When characters in the film engage in dance, they tap into a deep, almost instinctual source of joy, comfort, and unity.
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Thus, "Farewell Amor" beautifully exemplifies how muscle memory, through dance, can become a beacon of hope and a means of restoring and strengthening familial bonds in the face of adversity.

​Review of Farewell Amor

by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
​reposted from Spirituality and Practice

Wars and immigration policies and cruelties have separated wives and husbands, parents and children and grandparents from each other. For most of those who have undergone such separations, it is hard to reunite; change has eaten away at their intimacy.
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Seventeen years ago, Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) fled Angola during the civil war, leaving his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) behind; they eventually got to Tanzania. Now he is a cab driver in New York City working double and triple shifts in order to send money to his family. He has tried to keep touch with them by long distant phone calls but he hardly knows his now teenage daughter.

In the opening scene of this film about the emotional challenges faced by refugees, Walter is meeting his wife and daughter up at terminal at JFK airport. They are all very awkward in each other's presence during this reunion and even more when Walter takes them to his small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. It's obvious they hardly know each other.

Esther tries to pick up her duties as wife and housemaker, but she is upset to discover that Walter has been keeping company with another woman. A conservative Christian, she finds some solace by making the family attend church. Meanwhile, Sylvia barely speaks to her parents and after a while admits she is homesick for Africa.

Writer and director Ekwa Msangi opens up our empathy for all three characters by shifting the point of view from Walter to Esther and then to Sylvia. We get a sense of each of their stories and feelings and can understand their uneasiness with each other despite a yearning to connect. The tension between them escalates when Sylvia wants to join a dance contest at school. Her God-fearing mother forbids it, but her father, who has fond memories of dancing with Esther in Angola, sides with his daughter.

In a substantive director's statement, Msangi points out the spiritual themes which tie together this touching drama:
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"Many of the Africans/Tanzanians, some of whom were exiled and unsure whether they would ever return home, relied on music and dance to remain connected to their culture and homeland. It was how they were able to share their culture with their children who were born abroad. Dancing to a particular song created a muscle-memory that preserved what they hoped they could one day return to."

Msangi closes by saying, "This is a theme that I explore in this film: how music and dance are used to hold memory and create a platform for hope and faith."
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Farwell Amor is a simple tale well told about the healing and transformative power of dance.

Meet the Actors
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​Afterthought

Chicakens dance, people dance, and trees dance. Colors dance, too. So do sounds. Even rocks dance in their own way. Wherever there is movement, there is a kind of dancing. A smile, a frown, a wink, a movement of the body during sleep: all is dancing. In the rhythm of human life, dance often emerges through struggle and pain. Grief is a form of dancing, as is the profound act of transforming grief into beauty. This transformation is what process theologians refer to as creative transformation, or, in the evocative words of Monica Coleman, "making a way out of no way." Creative transformation is one of the many ways of turning flesh into spirit and spirit into flesh, an ongoing dance of materialized or embodied spirituality.

One key to a fulfilling life is to dance in whatever ways are possible, by whatever means, for the well-being of all life, including your own. Theology, at its best, transcends mere description of how things were, how things are, or even how things could be. It offers guidelines for this sacred dance of turning spirit into flesh, teaching us the steps for living creatively and joyfully. It is, in essence, a dancing lesson.

"Farewell Amor," as reviewed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat below, exemplifies this dance beautifully. The film presents a series of profoundly important steps in this lesson of life, highlighting how dance, in its many forms, can be a powerful medium for expressing and transforming our deepest emotions.
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Jay McDaniel, Feb. 5, 2021