In “Ousmane,” Neighbors on the Margin Find Connection

Jorge Camarotti’s “Ousmane” is a quiet film full of big emotions. Its title character, played with great poise by Issaka Sawadogo, is an immigrant from Burkina Faso who works in Montreal in an industrial laundry (think: towels). Ousmane commutes to his job by riding a city bus and trudging through Quebec’s prodigious snows. During one such walk, he chances upon a neighbor of his, an older woman whom he has seen before. She is stooped over in the middle of the street, getting honked at by impatient drivers as she picks up a can that has fallen from a little cart that she pulls with her. Ousmane helps her out of that predicament, and he and the woman (who bears the same name, Édith, as the filmmaker’s grandmother, to whom the film is dedicated) form an unlikely connection.

But the connection is also tenuous. Édith (the convincing Marie-Ginette Guay) has dementia, and Ousmane and his wife, Ava (the luminous Nadine Jean), soon discover what many others have come to know, which is that it is not always easy to help a dementia patient. One isn’t quite sure what to do, and, in any case, one’s help is likely to be refused. In the film, inevitably, police officers and medical professionals get involved, and the action finds its way to a touching conclusion.

Camarotti’s great triumph is that his film affords its main characters—an African immigrant and a person with dementia—the full measure of their humanity. “I was trying to show this feeling of invisibility that these individuals experience in our society,” Camarotti, who himself emigrated from Brazil to Canada, in 2003, told me, over e-mail. “I also believe that the circumstances involving these characters came to be a way to express ‘feeling inadequate’ in the eyes of the world. A feeling I often experienced in my life.” Pushed to the margins of a society that regards them as outsiders, Ousmane and Édith are surviving—perhaps just barely, in Édith’s case—but they’re lonely. Ousmane has the consolations of his wife and their two daughters, but he misses his extended family, especially his mother. Édith has a grown daughter, who, we learn, wants nothing to do with her.

I asked Camarotti if he sensed a potential resonance between the situations of an immigrant and a person with dementia. “Definitely,” he wrote. “I believe that in both cases, they lost a sense of who they are.” Both scenarios interrupt the continuity between past and present selves, the stuff that, for most, is the cornerstone of identity. “In the immigrant experience,” Camarotti explained, “if one chooses to fully integrate in the new society, they have to erase a part of who they were back ‘home’ in order to create a new personality that lives by a whole set of new codes. As for dementia, during my research, I felt that the brain only remembers a version of ourselves that no longer exists—yet, it’s all one has left.”

“Ousmane,” which premièred at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and has won several awards around the world, doesn’t show us directly what Édith remembers of herself, but we do get such insights into Ousmane. In one scene, after receiving some bad news from his family back home, he talks with his wife about what he left behind. “I feel so far from them, from everything,” he says. “Even from myself.” (The characters speak in French; I am quoting the English subtitles.) In another scene, he complains of being homesick, and says, of the old life, “We were poor, but rich.” Regret and mixed feelings, Camarotti told me, are the price of starting over in a new place: “It’s a feeling that you will never know if you made the right decision or not.”

Two things haunted me in the days after I watched the film. One was the falling snow, which becomes almost a character in its own right. (“I always say that if it wasn’t for the winter, Montreal would be the best place in the world,” Camarotti told me.) The other was a Scandinavian folk song that Ousmane and his family sing for Édith around the table. “Who can sail without the wind? / Who can row without oars? / Who can part from a friend / Without shedding a tear?” The melody, in a minor key, is sad, pensive, unforgettable. As she listens, Édith smiles weakly and nods in time to the music. For a moment, she is all there. And she is not alone.