Nairobi Half Life

 

Kenyan award winning movie "Nairobi Half Life" (2012) directed by David "Tosh" Gitonga and starring Joseph Warimu and Nancy Wanjiku Karanja among others. 

Mwas (Joseph Warimu) is a young man making his life selling video movies and acting the part in order to sell them. He dreams of being an actor and gets half an opportunity when a theatre troupe comes to his village. 

On the way to Nairobi he is forced to do some chores by his cousin and gets promptly robbed the moment he enters into Nairobi. Forced into the streets he is arrested for a day and in jail meets a gang leader who provides him job. 

They do small odd jobs like stealing car parts. Mwas meanwhile gives an audition for a play at the National Theatre and lands the job. In stealing they graduate from stealing car parts to stealing cars themselves. 

The movie shows the dark underbelly of Nairobi crime life where crime is common, gangsters are hand in glove with the policemen, there is corruption, violence and brutality galore. Gitonga has deftly woven the plot nicely moving on two parallels - the crime life and the theatre life, the only common thread being Amina who is the girlfriend of one of the gangsters but who starts loving Mwas. 

Cinematography is quite breathtaking in the movie and both Joseph Warimu and Nancy Karanja have played their parts quite well. Its quite a realistic movie in that sense almost like Salaam Mumbai of Mira Nair. IMDB 7/10  

Mortu Nega

 

"Mortu Nega" an award winning film on Guinea-Bissau by Flora Gomes. 

War is going on against the Portugese and it is a war for independence from the colonialists so the nationalism is sky high. Diminga (Bia Gomes) wants to go to the frontier because her husband Sako (Tune Eugenio Almada) is fighting there. 

She reunites with her husband, but he ends up injured in the war. Diminga comes back to her village where she is welcomed back whole heartedly. Meanwhile Sako also comes back, but his injury has not gone yet. 

Just when independence is got, drought hits them and they all suffer because of that. There is a tribal village cultural dance and song which i think is to propitiate the rain gods. The rains do come in the end, which is the final shot of the movie, which the children dancing in the rain.

Bia Gomes has done a splendid role as Diminga. There is lot of pathos in the movie in the form of an untold grief, human tragedy with the war taking lives of innocent people, the tough, hard life of people, the sadness of people living with bare little essentials to go by, lack of education and all. IMDB 7/10  

4.99 kms

 

Good morning. 4.99 kms for the morning. Good strong head winds today. Have a nice day folks. 

Be Kunko

 

Short Guinean film "Be Kunko" by director Cheick Fantamady Camara. 

Its based on the refugee crisis due to which many teenagers are living in the refugee camp in Conakry. Life is tough to come by in the UNHCR camp due to which teenage children indulge in crimes of various sorts like car jacking, burglary, armed robbery, prostitution etc. 

There is a grandmother who is upholding all the family tradition of labour, hard work, love etc. but the children are more interested in quick half measures to get their jobs done. 

There's not much of a story developed in such a short movie (31 mins) but the picture above, which is the closing shot, depicts the angst and frustration of youth in a never ending war. 

9.09 kms

 

9.09 kms for the morning. Have a great day folks. 

Oil promises - how oil changed a country

 

Interesting documentary on how an oil discovery changed a country or rather did bring no change at all. 

This is a 85 minute DW documentary which spans a period of 10 years from 2007 when oil was discovered off the Ghana coast and it was felt that oil would bring in the riches and dramatically improve the lives of people living in a fishing village on the coast. 

Oil did come, big companies did come in with their investments and their gigantic machines and did give some work to the locals for a couple of years, but then it all dried up. People were left in the lurch. A lot was promised by the government, but nothing happened, well almost nothing. 

Well some change did take place, electricity did come in, some paved roads but fishing died completely because the algae from the oil slick that polluted the beaches and destroyed the fishing nets. The government was apparently making money from the oil but where was the money going. 

Contracts were awarded to Chinese and they brought in their own labour. That's probably symptomatic of Africa, big projects are awarded, but major chunk of the jobs go to foreign workers especially the skilled jobs. The locals are left with crumbs. 

Its also a subtle dig at globalisation, is globalisation helping the local communities from which it takes it resources, who benefits in the end - the big companies with their shareholders who get massive dividends, or the governments which pocket the taxes or the local villages who are equal stakeholders in the project. Do project affected persons get the real advantage from big infrastructure projects. Verdict is still out. 

Its a nice documentary, very languid pace, with some commentary, and lot of interviews with sub titles in English and the animations by Ebele Okoye was quite delightful. You can watch this documentary here 

An Evil Cradling

 

An autobiographical account of his 4 and half years of captivity in Lebanon by Brian Keenan, the Irishman who had gone to teach English at the American University in Beirut. 

As detailed an account as you can get, of his imprisonment, beatings, blindfoldness, chaining, inhumanisation, total subjection - mind and body of a person. Made for difficult reading at times, pages after pages of such tragedy and torment of a human being. Being made to sit inside a cramped room with no amenities, no fan, no light, no windows, for days on end is sheer torture. 

And all for what - for no cause, because he was Irishman, not a Britisher or American, and he was not a spy or a political or bureaucrat or a religious figure for being captured and tortured. Luckily for him he had John McCarthy for company most of his captive time and the two of them bonded so well that it became difficult for Brian Keenan to leave when the time came for his release.  

Goodreads 4/5