Die Frauen seines Lebens

The four-million metropolis of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, today: Young doctor Marco has made it. He has a successful career, his proud mother loves him above all, and with his wife Linda, he has raised their daughter Anastasia together. But the facade is crumbling. It is built on trauma, repression, and the constraints of societal expectations. When Marco decides to embrace his suppressed homosexuality after decades of self-denial, his world, held together by discipline and external pressures, begins to unravel. Not only does he suddenly become aware of the shortcomings of his past life, but this decision also prompts immediate reactions from his mother and wife. Both feel threatened in their existence and are thrown back on experiences of oppression from their own pasts marked by forced marriages, circumcision, and patriarchal tyranny. The situation escalates when Anastasia responds to the circumstances with a devious plan. In "The Women of His Life," Ahepka Yves Moïse N'Guessan reveals the wounds of Ivory Coast's present, shaped by colonialism, civil war, and political crises, through the biographies of his protagonists. The unfree handling of the topic of homosexuality becomes a symbol of a culture caught between tradition and progress, between breakthrough and stagnation. Although homosexual acts are not legally prohibited in this African country—unlike in neighboring Liberia and Ghana—they are still rejected by the majority of Ivorian society. In the end, however, N'Guessan uses the local references merely as a blueprint for a universal story about outdated male and female images, as well as the origins of taboos and their consequences. "The Women of His Life" is an enlightening and moving, above all, profoundly humanistic plea for the freedom to follow one's own path.