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  

La Vendedora de Rosas

La Vendedora de Rosas or The Rose Seller, a brutal Columbian movie by Victor Gaviria. Loosely based on a story by Hans Christian Anderson it depicts the lives of young girls in a crime infested, drug infested suburb of Columbia. Children who run away from their homes because of violence in their homes get caught into the drug gangs racket, sniffing glue and trying to eke a living in a violent poverty ridden world. Monica is the fulcrum of the story, brilliantly played by Leidy Tabares, she is the one around whom the other girls revolve a sort of an unofficial leader of them. In comes Andrea all of 10 years old, also run away from a violent home. The girls have to be smart to survive in this squalid world where young boys are constantly looking to take advantage of them. All of them have one soft spot, for Monica it is her dead grandmother whom she had loved very much. A sort of Salaam Bombay kinda movie it delves into a Columbian life where violence is a just a few seconds away. A lot of scenes in the movie is quite realistic. Gaviria has managed to extract quite brilliant performances from all the kids in the movie.