“For a child of immigrants, to return to the country and make this film is an accomplishment for me,” Thomas Ngijol told us about his feature Untamable, shot in Cameroon.
Thomas Ngijol continues to broaden his palette and win audiences over. A well-known comedian in France, he marks a new milestone with his fourth feature as a director: Untamable (Indomptables) opened the doors of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened at the Directors’ Fortnight.
In the streets of Yaoundé, Commissioner Billong—played by Ngijol himself—investigates the murder of a fellow police officer. This investigation, the film’s narrative throughline, allows the filmmaker to depict, beneath the guise of a crime thriller, contemporary Cameroonian society—its vitality as well as the constraints that weigh on it—with a mix of intensity and tenderness. The result is a film grounded in lived reality, deeply connected to the people brought to the screen, marked by a gripping, robust sense of realism. And it is unmistakably a Cameroonian film. Signed by Thomas Ngijol, born in France to Cameroonian parents, who has drawn on his own life and heritage to shape his work.
“Even though I live in France and grew up there, my origins lie elsewhere.” That elsewhere—Cameroon—has always been a place of profound connection for him. “I’ve known my country since I was little, in terms of its roots, and I’ve absorbed its essence.” It is a living, ever-evolving relationship: “And even at my age today, I’m still trying not to forget those roots, those values and those precepts I was raised with.” To the point that he felt a genuine need to make a film in Cameroon: “I’d reached a moment when I needed to, when I wanted to express those things. […] I just needed to find the right point of entry.” It came in 2021, during a trip to Cameroon for the Africa Cup of Nations; the ideas that had been germinating suddenly found a place, an anchor. “I had a spark. […] I was there, observing, and I saw where I could shoot, where my ideas could come to life.”
At the heart of Untamable is Commissioner Billong, a custodian of state and family authority, both caring and corrective toward his colleagues, his family, and everyone he encounters. In a world where some give in to corruption, convenience, or debauchery, he aims at putting people back on track, offering remarks and reprimands, freely grumbling with a weary, sometimes defeatist air. A moralizer who can be authoritarian or overly dogmatic, he nevertheless remains genuinely driven by a sense of justice and honor. “He’s a kind of father figure. […] He moves me because he’s awkward, because he doesn’t have the codes, but he means well.”
Yet the filmmaker spares him any judgment. “In the West, we live in a kind of comfort bubble and everyone thinks they hold the truth, when in fact it’s nowhere. […] Some societies have their own complexity, and it’s important to try to understand them before judging.” He clarifies his approach: “I tried to take that complexity into account without being judgmental, without imposing my perspective as a French filmmaker, writer, actor. I tried to stay true so as not to cheat.”
This approach also shapes the film’s direction, one of its true strengths. A kind of teeming human theatre unfolds before a humble camera—one that avoids grand gestures, instead capturing with precision the organic flow of life. A camera that trusts its actors and finds its balance at the heart of chaos.
Thomas Ngijol notes that the film is loosely inspired by Mosco Levi Boucault’s 1998 documentary A Murder in Abidjan. “The truth of that documentary really spoke to me, and I told myself I had to work with the same distance from the characters.”
Spontaneity, truth, and realism thus feed the film and form its strength. “I know Cameroonian society well—it’s organic, it’s bubbling, it’s not calm. And I needed that, actually. […] When I see Africa overly aestheticized in some films, when I see this Africa that’s a bit pretty, a bit soft, it’s not faithful.” Africa is alive, and for him it was unthinkable not to embrace that reality: “It’s alive, for better or worse. But things are happening. And I wanted to capture that. […] And the beauty of the film also lies in that truth, it seems to me.”
This led him to work with reality as it is: “I didn’t transform the neighborhoods” where the film was shot. “We didn’t stylize anything; we took things as they were, in their truth. Things are beautiful in their truth.”
The same approach applies to the representation of violence: “I have no attraction to violence, but it doesn’t scare me. So if it needs to be filmed, it’s filmed. I don’t linger: only the raw violence, because it’s part of life.”
He adds: “Violence exists everywhere. […] It’s not some Cameroonian creation either. So my job was to stay accurate, not to overdo it, not to stylize things, not to romanticize poverty. I have too much respect for that.” A genuine ethic: “It even goes beyond my work as a filmmaker; it’s a matter of upbringing.” And he continues: “I don’t like playing with poverty, I don’t like playing with violence. I’m not comfortable with escalation. […] It’s true that I always try to be vigilant there because, despite one’s upbringing, one can be clumsy.”
To breathe this living material into the film, Thomas Ngijol drew heavily from his own experience and his family, weaving fragments of life and snippets of language—heard or remembered—into both foreground and background, into the dialogue and situations that enrich the film. “I’m convinced that to reach people, you have to be intimate, you have to be sincere,” he says.
This intimacy and sincerity are also a way to speak to the widest audience: “I knew that beyond my Cameroonian origins, my work would resonate with a French audience, a Maghrebi audience, and beyond. […] We have different but shared stories through our colonial past and through so many aspects of our upbringing. So I knew some things would resonate.” Before summing it up beautifully: “When the intimate becomes universal, that’s when our work takes on its full meaning.”
Presenting the film in Cameroon was, in many ways, an essential step on this cinematic journey. “After the Cannes test, I had the test of presenting my film in Cameroon,” says Ngijol, whose premiere at the Directors’ Fortnight had already received strong critical response. “In Cameroon, there’s no Palme d’Or, no Directors’ Fortnight, but a completely different kind of pressure—very real—and it’s a major challenge.” A challenge successfully met: “It was an enormous source of pride, an absolute joy to screen the film there, to see people’s reactions, their embrace of it, with of course all the post-film conversations, always benevolent, because they connected with the film. […] And that is priceless.”
A pride he sums up this way: “I was born in Paris, I grew up in France, I often go to Cameroon, but I am not a Cameroonian resident. And for a child of immigrants, to return to the country and do this—it’s an accomplishment for me. And it may not be worth every Palme d’Or in the world, but it means a lot.”
Untamable received its Canadian premiere at CINEMANIA 2025.
