“Slumdog Millionaire” meets “Boyz n the Hood” by way of Tsotsi. “Nairobi Half Life” is one of those films that is so well done, it feels like we are watching an extraordinary reality show. Winner of a Best Actor award for Joseph Wairimu at the Durban International Film Festival and the Breakthrough Audience Award at AFI, as well as nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2013 Oscars, “Nairobi Half Life” is an exciting, seamless, provocative, not-to-be-missed journey to reach an impossible Rocky-type goal.
George “Mwas” Mwangi (Wairimu) is a nice kid from a Kenyan upcountry village who absolutely bristles with the glow of someone who knows what they are, who they want to be, and that nothing can get in their way of achieving it. We want to follow Mwas on his path toward an acting career in the big city because he embodies what most of us lack—true love of a dream. Even though his drunken father tries to berate him with what we would hear in Western circles as truth, saying, “The better you become, the harder they try to stop you,” we learn over the course of Mwas’s journey that his biggest roadblock for personal success is himself.
Charismatic and effervescent, Mwas lands in Nairobi sure he will become an actor because he paid every last cent to an agent, who of course, was some guy on the take. Within minutes of getting off the bus in the big city, Mwas gets the “Nairobbery” welcome package of having everything—including a parcel of stolen radios to be delivered—taken from him. Swept up in a street crime that didn’t involve him, Mwas lands in a Nairobi prison, where he still manages to shine while slithering through the stool-infested system. While in there, he is (fortunately?) noticed by Oti, head of a local gang of car-part thieves.
The combined slums in Nairobi are larger than those of Mumbai. I have been to Kayole, visited an apartment of distant family who lives there—with no running water, intermittent electricity, and a view to the horizon of exactly what we see in the film: miles of ram-shackle structures. A family of four or more may live in a 10 x 10 room where to open the door a table, chair, and couch would need to be moved every time. And this was one of the upscale places. The rest, like where Oti and his gang base in Kiambu live, are tin and plywood at best.
We want to feel like Mwas is simply a victim of circumstances, that he somehow is caught up in the tides of fate, but not so. His charm and determination both land him an acting role and a high status place in the street gang. His “half life”—a play on his duality and, according to screenwriter Serah Mwihak in an interview for “Lifestyle Magazine” in Kenya, a “cigarette phrase” (in Kenya, when someone asks a smoker for a “half-life,” it means that they want to finish off the last half of the cigarette, regarded as the best part)—appears all luck when it comes to the finale.
And while the Best Actor award is nothing short of ironic (and well deserved) given the storyline, we can’t help but wonder if by taking this journey with Mwas, we all have been spared future bad choices that might impede us in finally achieving our wildest dreams.
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“Nairobi Half Life” will be showing at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) on December 8 at 11:45 AM
For more information and a complete program and schedule, please visit the Santa Fe Film Festival website. Purchase tickets at TicketsSantaFe.org.
