{"id":5890,"date":"2012-12-04T14:51:35","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T21:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/?p=5890"},"modified":"2018-07-17T19:21:49","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T01:21:49","slug":"the-island-we-live-upon-a-preview-of-nairobi-half-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/the-island-we-live-upon-a-preview-of-nairobi-half-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Island We Live Upon: A Preview of \u201cNairobi Half Life\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSlumdog Millionaire\u201d meets \u201cBoyz\u00a0n the Hood\u201d by way of Tsotsi. \u201cNairobi Half Life\u201d 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, \u201cNairobi Half Life\u201d is an exciting, seamless, provocative, not-to-be-missed journey to reach an impossible Rocky-type goal.<\/p>\n

George \u201cMwas\u201d 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\u2014true love of a dream. Even though his drunken father tries to berate him with what we would hear in Western circles as truth, saying, \u201cThe better you become, the harder they try to stop you,\u201d we learn over the course of Mwas\u2019s journey that his biggest roadblock for personal success is himself.<\/p>\n

\"Nairobi<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cNairobbery\u201d welcome package of having everything\u2014including a parcel of stolen radios to be delivered\u2014taken from him. Swept up in a street crime that didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014with 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201chalf life\u201d\u2014a play on his duality and, according to screenwriter Serah Mwihak in an interview for \u201cLifestyle Magazine\u201d in Kenya, a \u201ccigarette phrase\u201d (in Kenya, when someone asks a smoker for a \u201chalf-life,\u201d it means that they want to finish off the last half of the cigarette, regarded as the best part)\u2014appears all luck when it comes to the finale.<\/p>\n

And while the Best Actor award is nothing short of ironic (and well deserved) given the storyline, we can\u2019t 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.
\n– – – – – – – – – –
\n\u201cNairobi Half Life\u201d will be showing at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) on December 8 at 11:45 AM<\/p>\n

For more information and a complete program and schedule, please visit the\u00a0Santa Fe Film Festival website<\/a>. Purchase tickets at TicketsSantaFe.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNairobi Half Life\u201d is an exciting, seamless, provocative, not-to-be-missed journey to reach an impossible Rocky-type goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"festival_year":[],"class_list":["post-5890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19404,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5890\/revisions\/19404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5890"},{"taxonomy":"festival_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/santafefilmfestival.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/festival_year?post=5890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}