New film re-opens difficult talk on the queer habits of our lives

The Kenya Film Classification Board has barred The Nest Collective from screening Stories of Our Lives.

In a letter dated October 2, the board refused to allow distribution and exhibition of the film because it “has obscenity, explicit scenes of sexual activities and it promotes homosexuality which is contrary to our national norms and values”.

How can art, as a system of representation, approach invisibility? How do you use pictures in motion to tell a story about a subject that is in the shadows?

The rather clichéd title deflects alarm over the film’s content. Jim Chuchu, who directed and edited the film, says its goals were “a little … basic in terms of just saying that ‘gay people are people’”.

Like Invisible, the collection of poems and short stories published by Kevin Mwachiro last year, The Nest used interviews as the basis of their film about gay people finding themselves and finding love.

“We had over 250 audio conversations of queer-identifying people from around the country — Kisumu, Nakuru, Naivasha, Kipini,” says George Gachara, director of The Nest.

“I have never told anyone this” was a constant refrain that struck Gachara and motivated The Nest to create the space for these muted voices to be represented fairly and heard publicly.

CRYPTIC TITLES

Lead researcher Njoki Ngumi found “some of the stories so visual they naturally lent themselves to this medium of film”.

What emerged is this powerful hour-long anthology film made up of five distinct vignettes written by Ngumi and Chuchu. These vignettes are not necessarily the stories of this or the other interviewee, just as the actors in the film are not the actual people who were interviewed. The vignettes are composites of the numerous experiences of homosexual love, desire, anxiety, betrayal and fear.

Their titles are as cryptic as they are sensual— “Ask me Nicely”, “Run”, “Athman”, “Duet” and “Each Night a Dream”. The sequences flow into each other creating an interconnected narrative that opens with the hesitation of lesbian schoolgirls up against a harsh headmistress (played by Ngumi) and a tyrannical mother.

The final segment is about the nightly terror suffered by Liz, a lesbian who is always anxious that nosy neighbours will find out about her and Achieng; or that the police will come and arrest them.

The dream sequence alternates between graphic images of violent ouster and the miraculous escape proffered by a sex change. Interestingly, this sex change is achieved by invoking a traditional Kikuyu myth, which holds that if one ran around a mugumo tree seven times they would change from being female to male, or vice versa.

Is the choice of grey-scale in this film meant to ensure that nothing is seen too clearly? Or is it meant to enhance the emotional connection between the viewers and the characters?

In an age when digital technology allows film-makers to manipulate colour extensively, a black and white film evokes nostalgia and makes a claim to telling an ancient tale. Here, the absence of colour dramatises the issues of a heavily contested subject even further.

Everything is grainier, making the high contrast a reflection of the sharp binary of opinions on homosexuality where one is either living in the dark shadows or out in the white fearing the consequences.

By detracting colour, the film-makers give bold edges to the actors faces forcing the viewer to focus on the actors’ vivid expressions.

UNDER THE RADAR

But maybe this sustained use of grey-scale reinforces the legacy of invisibility that dominates the subject of homosexuality. In conservative societies that silence public conversations on alternative sexuality, queer people learn how to fly under the radar.

The contrast between “old” grey-scale images and the vibrant Sheng spoken by the characters creates an interesting aesthetic clash. It is a struggle to underline that the experiences being narrated here are truly local and old.

Those unfamiliar with the 1950s origins of Sheng would argue that its use here is a testament that homosexuality is a new fad among the youth.

Jim Chuchu created the soundtrack, weaving an intricate mix of tender melodies. Some of them carry a distinctly jazz feel but like the highly imaginative music he made during his stint with Just a Band, many of Chuchu’s songs here are genreless! The most compelling of them is “Ixana Yaadu”. It floods the dream sequence in the final vignette after a haunted Liz ponders, “tutapigana, ama tutahepa?...Na tutahepea wapi ? … Sometimes na wish tungepewa land yetu”. 

It is tempting to call Stories of Our Lives a brave film. Indeed, that was the repeated description at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) where it premiered on September 5.

But Stories of Our Lives is more strategic than brave. When it was entered at TIFF, the film’s directors, producers and actors were listed as Anonymous, stirring the kind of curiosity that would later occasion labels like “brave” and “risky”. When Ngumi, Gachara and Chuchu travelled to Toronto they ultimately owned up to their work.

At interviews with the trio, the Canadian press turned recent events in Uganda into the standard “plight of homosexuals in Africa”. Wearing suitable expressions of bewilderment, the reporters invoked the 2011 killing of Ugandan gay activist David Kato to heighten the chorus of fear over the serious dangers that The Nest was courting with a film about being gay in Kenya.

YOUNG GAY LIVES

It is ironical that these reporters kept subsuming Kenyan experience under the broad umbrella “Africa” (does that include South Africa and its liberal laws?). In the “Duet” sequence of the film, Jeff, a Kenyan homosexual on a visit to England, quickly cures the white lover he hires for £250 of this common generalisation with his firmly stated demarcation: “Kenya. Africa is a continent. We don’t like it very much when people group us together like that.”

This film’s treatment of homosexuality as a valid existence, however, overlooks some variations in same-sex relationships, particularly those that were sanctioned by traditional institutions.

Take for example the non-sexual, socio-economic basis of the woman-to-woman marriage common among Kikuyus, Nandis and Kisiis.

By focusing their film on the gay lives of 15-25 year olds, The Nest did themselves no favours. This age-group lends itself to public recriminations so easily; forever condemned for imitating decadent fads from the West.

Ngumi clarifies that the oldest person they interviewed was 42 years old.

Still, this film would have had greater resonance if it had actually depicted the 65 and 80-year-old queers in our midst. Can they also tell us why no Kenyan has ever been hauled before the courts, prosecuted for homosexual activities?

The Classification Board gave The Nest 14 days to appeal against the restriction. Without worrying too much about the reasons why the sex comedy House of Lungula (2013) was licensed for 18+ viewing, will The Nest expunge the scenes that the Board found disturbing and reapply for permission to screen their film? Hopefully, a reassessment is in the offing because there are many things to be learnt from Stories of Our Lives, including the aesthetics of film-making.