Last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, I had the opportunity to chat with Zippy Kimundu about her documentary Widow Champion, which focuses on a woman’s fight for land rights in Kenya. Once again, I dipped my toes back into African cinema and Kenyan land rights with One Woman One Bra, directed by Vincho Nchogu. Nchogu paints beautiful tableaus of the Kenyan countryside as we quietly watch a woman try to discover her past and find acceptance in a village she wants to call home.
Star (Sarah Karei) is a single woman living a quiet life in her home in a Kenyan village. As the village leaders give out Title Deeds, a piece of paper ensuring people can stay on their land, Star is overlooked because she has no proof of kinship. Orphaned as a child, Star has no connection to her past, threatening her security on the land. After she discovers her picture on the front cover of a tourist photography book, Star goes to great lengths to find her family and prove her kinship in order to save her home. In doing so, Star is put up against other women in the community.
Nchogu, along with cinematographer Muhammad Atta Ahmer, is patient with the camera, slowly tracking Star’s journey, painting beautiful pictures and portraits of Star, her home, and the villagers. Atta Ahmer is a virtuoso in his framing. There is vibrant color, lush nature, and strokes of warm sunlight creating an atmosphere of peace that undercuts the tension and pressure building as Star goes up against the village, and eviction looms.
With a simple script, minimal exposition, and no introduction to anyone Star interacts with, Nchogu, who also penned the screenplay, blends her narrative with a documentary-style look, allowing audiences to savor the images and form their own judgment on the villagers and Star’s actions.
Quiet in every sense of the word, Nchogu speaks volumes through the menial sequences in which Star interacts with “outsiders,” notably a woman who “supports organizations” (nonprofits) in the area and the white photographer who took Star’s picture over 30 years ago. Star, with the very real possibility of losing her home, looks to these people for help, only to be exploited and pushed aside once her usefulness to their causes is over. She creates a video to help the woman earn “exposure” and “real impact” for a cause that helps women, only for Star to find herself in more trouble. And the man, who profited off the book, writes her off as “one of those people” who only look for money, something she needs almost as much as she needs to find proof of family.
In the end, Nchogu lets Star’s frustration, sorrow, anger, desperation, and sadness reach a boiling point, culminating in an emotional monologue from Karei. Not only fighting for her physical home, but a sense of community, Nchogu leaves us with Star in shambles, holding what she was looking for all along, deciding whether or not to give it all up.
Haunting, vulnerable, sad, but beautiful, Nchogu tells the story of a woman on her own, fighting to find a sense of self and belonging. And while land rights in Kenya may not be the conflict we women in the West face daily, the exploitation, expectations, and loneliness Star faces are something all too relatable in a story that stretches beyond one village.
Review Courtesy of Sara Ciplickas
Feature Image Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival