Kenya’s latest feature film was premiered across the country on Saturday night, but its makers will never know how much it took at the box office
The Times
Jerome Starkey, Africa Correspondent
Kenya’s latest feature film was premiered across the country on Saturday night, but its makers will never know how much it took at the box office. The tale of love and betrayal in the slums was not screened at any of the nation’s dozen or so cinemas — they remain the preserve of a small middle-class.
Instead Jongo Love, originally a radio drama, was released in almost 1,200 movie-dens: shacks with wooden benches where customers pay about 20p to see a film, play a games console or watch football on television.
Shot on a mobile phone, the 16-rated film aims to empower the youth of Kenya’s slums. It tells the story of a teenage girl sold into prostitution by her alcoholic mother who gets her life back on track.
“This movie is talking to guys who don’t have money to eat, let alone see a film,” said Vincent Muthini, 25, the assistant producer who grew up in Mathare, one of the two slums outside Nairobi where the film was made. “The film is about trying to make those people think about the future, not just where they are now.”
Unlike Nigeria, which has a thriving homegrown industry — Nollywood — few films are made in or about Kenya, unless they are about wildlife. Jongo Love is the latest spin-off from Shujaaz, a popular Kenyan comic book and multimedia platform that aims to educate and entertain, and which has spawned an Emmy award-winning soap opera set in Jongo, a fictional slum on Nairobi’s outskirts.
The characters speak Sheng, the patois of the urban young, which is an often humorous blend of English, Swahili and other tribal tongues.
In Sheng a pregnant woman is “ball”. A lover with no future is a duvet, because they keep you warm at night. Stereo means good, but chrome is better, because it was the most expensive cassette tape before they all became obsolete.
Slightly more arcane is Form 16A, for a man who makes a woman pregnant and then disappears. He is named after the electoral return document, which had a habit of going missing during the violently disputed 2007 presidential polls.
The actress Ann Mitu, 23, who also grew up in Mathare and got pregnant at 19, plays a single mother in the film. She said the message was that you “can always use the things around you to better your own life”, which was why the film-makers used a mobile phone.
“I don’t want to see young mothers sitting at home moaning about how they came to get pregnant,” she added. “Of course, you could have have done something different, but now that you are there what are you going to do about it?”
Rather than fighting the bootleggers who sell pirated DVDs, Jongo Love’s makers released 7,000 DVDs that state that the bearers are free to “sell, distribute, lend lease or display”.
“The key thing is for people to see it,” Mnikelo Qubu, the head of Well Told Story, Shujaaz’s producers, said. (Read more...)
