Sidebar

Exclusive Reports

29
Fri, Mar

Banned Director Wants To Turn Africa’s Image On Its Head

Top Stories
Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

Wanuri Kahiu is remarkably chipper for someone who went from national hero to being accused of corrupting Kenyan youth in little over a week.

Her film “Rafiki”, a touching love story between two middle-class Nairobi girls, is the first Kenyan film ever to be selected for the Cannes film festival.

At first, the head of the Kenyan Film Classification Board, Ezekiel Mutua, “went on air to say great things about it”, Kahiu told AFP just before its Cannes premiere Wednesday.

But a few days later the self-styled “fervent moral crusader” changed his mind, banning the bubblegum teenage romance for its “happy ending” and for showing “the resilience of youngsters involved in lesbianism”.

Daring to show the film in the conservative East African country, where LGBT people can face long prison sentences, could land the director in jail. Lesser mortals might be intimidated, but not Kahiu who is on a mission to turn Africa’s image on its head.

“Rafiki”, with its skateboarding- and music-obsessed heroines, could be set almost anywhere in the world. “Africa is always depicted as a place with lots of pain, suffering, war and disease,” said the 37-year-old, a TED Talk regular who made a big splash at the Sundance festival in 2010 with her sci-fi short “Pumzi”, about a world without water.
culled from Vanguard

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS