Cameroonian Short Duct-Tape Explores Silence, Masculinity, and Displacement at Alma Film Festival
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Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic — The Cameroonian short film Duct Tape, directed by Membong Epiemembong, has been selected to screen at the Alma Film Festival as part of its Short Film category.
Set in Yaoundé, the film centers on Epie, a fourteen-year-old boy who fled conflict and has been living with his aunt for four years. Though removed from immediate danger, he carries a secret that quietly shapes his daily life. Surrounded by expectations about masculinity and strength, he chooses silence rather than risk exposure. The film asks, without melodrama, how long that silence can hold.
With controlled pacing and intimate framing, Duct Tape examines the psychological terrain of displacement and the internal costs of emotional suppression. Rather than relying on overt dramatics, the film locates its tension in restraint — in glances, pauses, and what remains unsaid.
The screening forms part of a curated block of films representing works from across Sub-Saharan Africa, assembled by Elvis Buminang, Karl Safindah, and the editorial team at Between Takes Magazine. The program reflects a growing international interest in African short-form storytelling that prioritizes character, context, and social nuance.
About the Alma Film Festival
The Alma Film Festival was created in response to structural gaps in the global film ecosystem. By design, it is a next-generation destination, experience-based film festival and cultural convening—one that functions as a cultural intelligence engine, bringing together filmmakers, scholars, technologists, artists, institutions, and audiences from across the Global South and its diasporas.
Rooted in scholarship, innovation, and deep audience engagement, Alma prioritizes fewer films with greater intentionality, creating space for meaningful dialogue, relationship-building, and long-term collaboration. With up to 80% of the program dedicated to Global South cinema, the festival showcases narrative features, documentaries, shorts, animation, experimental works, audio storytelling, and new media—centering films that engage cultural memory, social relevance, and creative innovation.
Programming is curated in partnership with global entities and agencies, reinforcing Alma’s role as a platform for shared authorship rather than extraction. Through this approach, the festival has cultivated a global community of stakeholders spanning more than 51 cities across 35 countries.
Beyond screenings, Alma integrates fellowships, symposia, performance laboratories, editorial platforms, and emerging technologies—positioning the festival not simply as an event, but as an ecosystem. Guided by the principle “The Necessity of Something New,” the Alma Film Festival advances cultural diplomacy, fosters cross-regional collaboration, and contributes to the development of sustainable creative economies worldwide.
At its core, the Alma Film Festival is a global gathering designed to nurture both ideas and people. It embraces a kaleidoscope of cultures while intentionally shifting the social dynamic from competition to connection—creating space for collaboration, understanding, and shared growth. Alma moves us from extraction to exchange, from visibility to value, and from presence to purpose.
We are doing something new.
There is a necessity for something new.
#AlmaFilmFestival
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