STORIES OF OUR LIVES
DIRECTOR: Jim Chuchu
CAST: Kelly Gichohi, Paul Ogola, Tim Mutungi, Mugambi Nthiga
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12PG L P
RUNNING TIME: 59 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Stephen Dalton
A mix of journalistic chronicle, political protest and gorgeous visual poem, Stories of Our Lives is an anthology of five minidramas with LGBT themes from of Kenya. It was made by the Nairobi art and activist group, The Nest Collective, many of whose members prefer to conceal their identities to avoid possible persecution under Kenya’s draconian anti-gay laws. Last year, the project’s executive producer, George Gachara, was arrested briefly for filming without an official permit.
Stories of Our Lives remains banned in Kenya, despite picking up awards abroad. Last week, it made its UK debut at the BFI Flare Festival in London. The topical theme and positive buzz should ensure further festival interest.
The five dramas are mostly personal and domestic, but snippets of real news footage bring a broader political context. In 2012, an Anglican bishop in Mombasa called gays and lesbians a bigger threat to Kenya than terrorists. Last year, an attempt was made to pass a bill mandating that LGBT people could be stoned to death. It failed, but even consensual adult same-sex relations remain an imprisonable felony.
Given this backdrop, we might well have expected Stories of Our Lives to be an angry soapbox movie, or at least a worthy slice of preachy docudrama. But not so. Shot on a single digital camera, the film has a luminous monochrome look and slickly edited polish that defies its $15 000 budget. The music, by first-time director Jim Chuchu, is ambient and sensual. And the stories are emphatically not what Chuchu calls “pathologised NGO tales”. Instead, they cover a broad spectrum of queer experience, from tragedy to comedy, unrequited love to defiant romantic bliss.
Stories of Our Lives began as a documentation project of real case studies that Chuchu and his team then turned into dramatic vignettes, each compressed into 12 minutes or less. The most bittersweet is Athman, about a rural farm labourer with a secret crush on his co-worker. A tense confession of repressed desire is met more with bafflement than hostility, but it still drives the two apart. The most overtly sexual chapter, Duet, is about a black Kenyan researcher hiring a white British escort during a business trip to the UK. Their hotel-room encounter progresses from a comically awkward discussion of cultural and racial differences to erotic massage and more.
A pair of lesbian love stories bookend the film. In Ask Me Nicely, two teenage girls begin an affair that earns both disgust from their teachers and temporary suspension from school. At home, one meets a boy and sleeps with him to test if she is “totally purely gay,” but her experiment ends badly. In the closing chapter, Each Night I Dream, two female lovers struggle in the face of angry mobs and government homophobia. Their escapist fantasy is a magical dream world of hand-held sparklers and idyllic woodland.
Making impressive use of limited resources, Stories of Our Lives is clearly a passion project. A few of the unschooled performances feel stiff and all would have benefited from the extra breathing room afforded by the running time of a full-length feature. Even so, Chuchu has made a brave, beautiful, timely film, which boldly stands up for hope and love in the face of bigotry and bullying. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Samuel’s Truth, you will like this film.