Tag: Kenya

Blind Love

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A blind man and a deaf woman fall for each other in Blind Love, a Kenyan slice-of-life comedy-drama with oodles of oddball charm. Injecting great humour and verve into its depiction of disabled life, it enlivens and surprises the audience right until the final scene.

Brian (Mr. Legacy) is unable to see. His seeing dog has just died, unceremoniously run over by a car. Abel (Jacky Amoh) is deaf, and is tasked with taking him home one day. Despite their disabilities, they find innovative ways to communicate, empathetically and intuitively portrayed by both Legacy and Amoh. Brian then realises that if they drink a magic spirit, they are able to communicate unhindered in their dreams, caught in black-and-white fantasy sequences. But the liquor is as much a gift as a curse, resulting in many unintended consequences.

Director Damian Hauser directs, edits, shoots and composes the music, keeping a close authorial control of the film’s tone; which appears to freewheel along while underpinning the narrative with a much darker narrative pull. As it uses such poppy filmmaking method to tackle serious themes, Blind Love almost runs the risk of trivialising what it wants to portray, but eventually brings it all together in the shocking finale. It’s even more impressive when you realise that Swiss director Hauser was born in 2001.

It shows that violence begets violence, spurred on by ignorance, jealousy, lust and copious amounts of liquor. Neither man (alcoholic, ignorant, unfaithful) or woman (jealous, scornful, scheming) come out of it well, the film even ending with a postscript asking why people continue to have children when there is so much suffering in the world. Sprinkled in with a little black magic, it asks whether people are in control of what they do or if they become possessed by their emotions. This is not the hipster capital Nairobi, as seen in Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018), but a place seemingly lost in time, with little government help, as seen when people take justice into their own hands.

It’s not a pretty depiction of rural Kenya, but the filmmaking has a vital feel at odds with its themes, mixing widescreen with academy ratio, long, detached pans with frantic handheld shots. It finds plentiful ways to move between past and present with ease, as well as smartly switching between plot and subplot before finding a truly tragic way to bring these two together. The non-actors and countryside setting keeps an authentic vibe, with Hauser able to coax out great performances that just feel like people living their own lives.

It’s great to see more sub-Saharan African stories making it to major European film festivals and that co-productions with countries like Switzerland are making them happen. Blind Love is the kind of small yet affecting film you want to find at a fest; surprising, unconventional and filled with a fine personal filmmaking touch.

Blind Love plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

When Lambs Become Lions

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Both sides of the ivory trade are thrillingly explored in documentary When Lambs Become Lions, which has truly amazing unfiltered access to both rangers and poachers at a wildlife park in Northern Kenya. Withholding judgement while expanding perspectives, it is a great example of how the documentary form can muddy even the most ostensibly clear-cut moral cases.

Filmed in gorgeous widescreen format, elephants elegantly roam the landscape. The rangers, armed with machine guns, talk about them in reverent tones, as if they are holy creatures. They are less kind to the poachers they find hunting with bow and arrow. They throw them to the floor, kick them in the head, and threaten to kill them, making us wonder what they would do if the cameras weren’t rolling.

On the other side are these poachers, who we learn about via an unnamed protagonist. When looking purely at the facts, it’s easy to see wildlife poachers as unambiguously bad people. However he argues that he has no other choice and has to provide for his family, making him a sympathetic person despite his actions. When Lambs Become Lions does a great job of illuminating this perspective, showing us that the real issues are more structural than personal, leading up to the highest offices of the country.

When Lambs Become Lions

With the International Union for Conservation of Nature listing the African elephant as a vulnerable species, the ivory trade threatens to wipe them out completely. The Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta is serious about ending ivory poaching: in 2016, he even burned over $100 million worth of stolen ivory as a pledge to make it stop. These burning tusks form the opening of the movie, an ominous ballet of flames and smoke a symbol of the conflict’s endless violence.

Perhaps he should’ve actually sold some of the ivory: at one meeting we learn that the rangers haven’t been paid in two months. This leads to a fascinating alliance between one poacher and ivory hunter that sees them having more in common than the government might have you think. Meanwhile danger hangs over every scene, with both sides afraid of being killed by the other. Director Jon Kasbe is fearless, breathlessly joining the poachers on their hunt despite knowing that they could be killed at any moment. This results in some truly thrilling non-fiction storytelling that equals any big-budget action film.

Kasbe spent three years with his subjects, allowing us to really get into their lives. His fly-on-the-wall approach works wonders here: with no editorialising or sermonising, the Brooklyn-based director allows these two men to tell their own story. Compressed into a punchy 76 minute runtime, When Lambs Become Lions rarely wastes a frame; all leading into a paradigm-changing final scene. By the end it is unclear who is the lion and who is the lamb: revealing a grey area in-between as wide and deep as the plains of Kenya itself.

When Lambs Become Lions is in UK cinemas on Friday, 14th February.