Africa at IFFR 2013: Nairobi Half Life

Nairobi Half Life by David ‘Tosh’ Gitonga may come from the same country and the same co-production scheme as Something Necessary, but it is a rather different proposition. It’s a fast moving, highly polished satire on city life which sets out to entertain. It wouldn’t seem out of place in a multiplex and it scored well in Rotterdam’s audience poll. Right now it has a 46-screen release across the USA.

As in many crime entertainments we are encouraged to admire the nerve and skill of the film’s hero. This is Mwas (Joseph Wairimu), a country boy who makes a living selling DVDs of Hollywood movies, but who dreams of being an actor himself. He goes to the capital to try his luck, but he is robbed of everything within minutes of stepping off the bus. Then he is thrown in jail.

His natural exuberance wins him the respect of fellow prisoner Oti (Olwenya Maina), a small-time gangster who sets him on the road to a life of crime. But in parallel Mwas pursues his acting dream, winning his first stage role playing a housebreaker in a political farce. As his criminal career goes from strength to strength (well, mostly) the big day of his stage debut also approaches.

The story could take place almost anywhere in the world, apart from the extreme criminality which the film invites us to see as characteristic of Nairobi. Take the spectacular way Mwas is stripped of his possessions when he arrives in the city, at which point we are reminded that the city is nicknamed Nairobbery. Later on Oti steals a mobile phone from a woman using it in the street, shouting back at her “Where do you think you are?” Crime and the city are synonymous. Crime is normal, and people who think otherwise are fools.

Nairobi Half Life — Where do you think you are?
(photo: IFFR)

It’s interesting to compare this with Something Necessary, which acknowledges the damage done in the post-election violence but aims to understand the underlying causes. Nairobi Half Life normalises the negative and has little interest in explaining it. In a way the film has the same outlook as Mwas, who at one point has to negotiate a turd-strewn toilet in the jail. Finding it impossible to avoid the shit, he ends up sliding about in it, doing a song and dance number.

As an outsider I found the film very entertaining and so over-the-top that my immediate reaction was not to take the crime and violence too seriously. If it were my own home town on the screen I might feel differently, but dipping into local press coverage on the web suggests that no-one is particularly bothered by this depiction of Nairobi. One blogger even celebrates the fact that the film does “urban filth” so much better than Hollywood.

That’s great for a film that stands out from the crowd, but bad news if it becomes the trademark of a whole industry. And when will US audiences see their next Kenyan film?

A couple of other things happen in Nairobi Half Life that I think are worth mentioning. The first is the way in which the film deals with prostitution, portraying it as an economic choice without a moral or even much of a sexual dimension. This is interesting because it creates a space for strong, independent female characters without objectifying them on screen. What defines Amina (Nancy Wanjiku Karanja) is not that she is sexually available, but that she is unavailable, at least as far as Mwas is concerned. She becomes a character in her own right, not just the ‘tart with a heart’ so familiar in US and European films.

This looks increasingly like a theme worth investigating in African cinema. Just off the top of my head, it reminds me of a brief scene in Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar (1993) where a prostitute justifies her choices, and Henri Duparc’s Rue Princesse (1994), which is built around a romance between a musician and a prostitute. So maybe I mean an interesting theme in films by male African directors…

The second thing of note is the merest hint of a sympathetic gay character (and one of the best jokes in the film, which I won’t give away), which is unusual enough in my experience of African cinema to warrant recording. It has certainly caused as much comment in the Kenyan press as all the urban filth, violence and police corruption put together.

André Deutsch in Africa

A lot of the African fiction I read is second-hand and I’m used to looking out for the distinctive spines of the Fontana and Heinemann African writers series as I run my eye along the shelves of book and charity shops. I’ve also wondered idly how so many African writers came to be published in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Doubtless that question will be answered in full when I get around to Charles R Larson’s The Ordeal of the African Writer, but in the meantime I was interested to stumble across Diana Athill’s brief account in Stet, her memoir of working for publisher André Deutsch.

Distinctive spines

In 1963 the company helped set up the African Universities Press in Nigeria, followed two years later by the East African Publishing House in Kenya. According to Athill, it was André Deutsch himself who found local capital to start these businesses, put together editorial boards and found managers. The London company remained a minority shareholder and had no say in which books were printed, simply taking the option to publish those with international appeal under its own imprint.

This usually meant books about African politics and economics, along with some fiction. Athill says her favourites among the novels were The Gab Boys by Cameron Duodu and My Mercedes is Longer than Yours by Nkem Nwankwo (both new to me and now duly added to the reading list).

She describes André’s involvement in Africa as a romantic one, and says the motivation for publishing African authors at that time was a combination liberal guilt, curiosity and a desire to get in early on a potentially large overseas market. “Many [people in book publishing] were genuinely interested in hearing what writers in those countries had to say now that they were free,” she writes. “For a time during the fifties and early sixties it was probably easier for a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher, and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white person.”

Belgian cinema in February

Young directors often get carried away with stylistic flourishes, the sort of gratuitous image making that can be forgiven in the hope that it will be brought to order in subsequent films or at least connected more firmly to the storytelling. That’s fine in an environment where a tyro director can turn out a film every year or so, but things tend to move more slowly in Belgium. That’s why we have movies like Le Monde nous appartient, Stephan Streker’s self-indulgent sophomore feature, which came out in February nine years after his debut Michael Blanco (2004). At this rate, he may never get the exuberance out of his system.

The film concerns the crossed destinies of young professional footballer Julien (Ymanol Perset) and petty criminal Pouga (Vincent Rottiers). Julien is on the rise, waiting for a break that will get him into the team. Pouga is slipping back into crime, addicted to the rush he gets from snatching a handbag or stealing a car, yet unable to turn to parole officer Magali (Dinara Droukarova) because he loves her with a ferocious, undeclared passion.

We know from the outset that the two young men meet and that one of them gets knifed. Streker then takes a step back to explore their lives in Brussels, contrasting Julien’s conditioned ambition with Pouga’s joy in the physical sensation of speed and martial arts. Meanwhile actual and surrogate father figures play an important role for both in their transition to full adulthood.

The best way to explain the problem I have with Streker’s visual style is to say that it feels like advertising. I feel as if he is trying to sell me a car rather than tell me a story in which a car is important, or indeed to sell me a rhino rather than use its appearance in an underpass as a symbol of Pouga’s relationship with his father. The images are great — I’ll buy the rhino — but they distract me rather than keep me in the story.

Le Monde nous appartient

That said, some of Streker’s images do work well. There is a taut heist sequence that combines violence and absurd comedy, and the film is very good at exploiting Brussels’ underground spaces, from road tunnels to the pre-Metro. Yet some of the most effective moments are simply about acting, from Zoltan (Reda Kateb) riffing on the need for a criminal to dress sharply to Julien’s father (Olivier Gourmet) not listening to a phone conversation as he slips back into a gambling addiction.

As a Brussels film, Le Monde nous appartient has appropriately mixed credentials. It was funded by the film commissions on both sides of the linguistic divide, and although there is no Flemish spoken you have Sam Louwyck on screen and a substantial musical contribution from Flemish singer-songwriter Ozark Henry. However the young male leads are French rather than Belgian, something that is starting to look like a trend. Think of Rottiers in L’Hiver dernier, Guillaume Gouix and Matila Malliarakis in Hors les murs, or Gouix and Arthur Dupont in Mobile Home. Where are the successors to Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier meant to come from if not local productions?

Also arriving on Belgian screens in February was Kinshasa Kids, a shallow docu-fiction about Congolese street children striving for a better life through music. The film is frustrating on many levels, not least of which is its inability to tell a story or develop characters effectively. The adults come through, but the kids themselves remain two-dimensional. There are many strategies in documentary and fiction for addressing this, even under difficult conditions, but none have been used successfully here.

Then there was Frits & Franky, a sequel to the Flemish hit Frits en Freddy (2010), with writer/producer Marc Punt taking over directing duties from Guy Goossens. The original was a good-natured crime comedy, leaning heavily on reliable actors and a nicely colloquial script, thick with bickering and insult. Only Peter Van den Begin reprises his role in the sequel, with the nervous, gullible Franky (Sven De Ridder) replacing the psychotic Freddy (Tom Van Dyck) as a foil for Frits. That means less energy and a pathetic note to much of the comedy, particularly in a plot strand where Franky becomes besotted with a kind-hearted prostitute. In all, the film is a bit of a drag to watch.

Like its predecessor, Frits & Franky was made without public subsidy, something that is still a relative rarity in Belgium, even with the large amounts of money flowing into production through the national tax shelter. This time, however, a good deal of the plot revolves around animosity between the Flemish and the Dutch, so the goal may be to add cross-border appeal to the formula. Initially set for a Dutch release in early March, the film seems to have fallen off the latest schedules.