By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted to DN Life&Style 10 May 2021)
Kenyans have
just a few more days in which to watch one of the best films recently made
about the lives and struggles of ordinary Nairobians.
‘Tales of
the Accidental City’ has already been shown at international film festivals in
New York, San Francisco, and Cannes. And in July, it will be shown at the
Durban International Film Festival.
Currently,
it’s being streamed at the Freiburger Film Forum website for free through Sunday,
May 16. It’s part of a Festival of Transcultural Cinema so it’s watching just
to see this ingenious film written and directed by Maimouna Jallow and starring
Wakio Nzenge, Eddie Kimani, Mercy Mutisya, Martina Ayoro, and Tana Kioko with a
cameo appearance by Sitawa Nambalie.
The story
was originally meant to be a play about four very different Nairobians whose
commonality is only that they all have been ordered by the court to attend an
Anger Management class. Their ‘crime’ is an inability to control their emotions
resulting in damages done to other parties.
But then, the
play was transformed into a three-part audio drama by Maimouna once COVID led
to the shut down of local theatres, It’s still online and also featured at the Ake
Cultural Festival in Ghana.
Now in its
third and most captivating iteration, ‘Tales’ has been re-imagined as an
ingenious 55-minute film that blends humor with truth-telling to reveal many
facets of Nairobi’s underbelly.
What’s more,
the Anger Management class itself is conducted on Zoom, so that the ales’ are
told on a split screen, as if in real time. We’re able to see Counsellor Rose
(played with ironic amiability by Wakio Mzende) as she tries to steer a
delightfully raucous session featuring four fractious characters.
The four
come from disparate socio-economic backgrounds, their meeting being just as
‘accidental’ as the city that’s contributed to both their woes and outrage. But
Counsellor Rose does a valiant job trying to keep order as each takes a turn revealing
the hard times and emotional stress that many Nairobians may easily identify
with.
For
instance, Jacinta (Mercy Mutisya) is a businesswoman (and former house maid)
who found her spouse Boni not only had a girlfriend who slept in her bed while
she was out. He made off with the cash she had worked hard to save and stash under
their mattress. That’s what really set off her rage.
“Teaching
him a lesson” is the vengeful motive that both Jacinta and Diana (Martina
Ayoro) pursued and which got them both into trouble. But Rose’s message is
there are better ways to cope with one’s anger than by violence and revenge.
Whether her ‘new age’ techniques work for any of them is left up in the air.
In graphic
detail Jacinta tells how she got her CID cousin to track Boni down, corner and
cuff him with two more CID cops so she could give him a healthy slap. Diana’s
payback to the woman who kidnapped her child in Gikomba was a stone thrown in the
woman’s eye, blinding the kidnapper.
Louis’ (Eddie
Kimani) crime is technically running over the Mayor’s dog. However, the
backstory is more complicated even as it exposes the corruption in his former
workplace. Throughout the class, he doesn’t hide his disdain for having to
attend Rose’s session. But he is also ‘paid back’ with taunts from Jacinta who
calls out this ‘former’ City Councilman for his claim he was only in the
Council to clean up corruption in City Hall.
The last
storyteller is Sarah (Tana Kioko) who admits she only landed at this zoom
session accidentally and wasn’t sent by the court. But her story sums up the
pain of poverty and of living as a vulnerable street girl who gets pregnant and
gives up the child.
These are
stories that rarely if ever get brought to the stage, leave alone featured in
Kenya’s fledgling film industry. Yet they give some of the truest pictures of
the trauma that Nairobi city life brings to some of the most vulnerable urbanites.
The street vender, ex-house maid, and single mother unnerved by Nairobi’s hustling
city life all are given voices in Maimouna’s ‘accidental city.’ And while
nearly all the ‘tales’ give voice to women who are normally voiceless, even the
former City Council man has a story we never hear, that of one ostensibly
honest politician who tries but fails to fix a broken political system that’s
beyond repair.
Here’s the link to buy tickets and watch the film during the
festival: https://freiburger-filmforum.culturebase.org/en_EN/films/tales-of-the-accidental-city.18796
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