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Four Kenyan short films based on Covid-19 selected for Ladima film competition


Four Kenyan short films have been selected in the just concluded Ladima Foundation which had in partnership with the DW Akademie announced a short film competition for African women content creators and filmmakers on life during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ten winning films were be selected by a jury across Africa and will this month be streamed on the Ladima website along with other partner websites.

‘THE TEMPEST’

The Tempest by Skinnor Davillah Agello is a short film about a dancer Davillah expressing how Covid -19 has changed her family and personal life, as well as millions of other lives across the globe. The dance performance reflects Davillah’s own personal challenges and solutions for coping with the pandemic, while encouraging those who view the piece to stay positive and safe.

Also selected is 22-year-old Hellen Samina Ochieng’s Moyo, which tells the story of Achieng, a young single mother working as an underpaid nurse in Mbagathi Hospital, Nairobi.

Achieng struggles with the grim financial, mental and physical realities of being a single mother, and the pressures of being a front-line, essential worker in a country crippled by a pandemic. When she is called into the hospital at midnight to attend to a Covid-19 emergency, she must turn to Mike, her abusive ex-boyfriend, to take care of her daughter Waridi.

Zawadi Wambui Gathee film Love looks at how the lockdown in the country has affected women. With the lockdown measures being enforced, vulnerable women and young girls are put in a position where the life-threatening outside is safer than their own homes and at times forced to make difficult choices.

In Face Mask for Sale, Neha Manoj Shah tells the story of how wearing a face mask has become the new normal. This is the story of a single mother in the time of Covid-19, stuck, with no choice but to survive.

REAL LIFE STORIES

The competition aimed to encourage African women to share their real life stories from different African countries as they face various degrees of lockdowns that limit their movements, opportunities and, often, basic freedoms.

According to the organisers, the pandemic has affected women more in terms of increasing cases of domestic violence and their burden of care.

The themes of the competition was about women with special needs/coping with special needs during the lockdown/caring for persons with special needs during a global pandemic; impact on family/domestic life; economic/impact on work life; domestic violence/abuse; hope in the time of Covid-19.

It also attempted answer the question are women paying a higher price? And how does the crisis highlight and affect the role of women? Is the crisis offering an opportunity to rethink the social order and solidarity and empowerment among women.

The 10 selected films were chosen by a panel of expert judges and the winners will also receive 500 euro each and access to a year’s worth of webinars on the USA’s Women Make Movies platform valued at about $500.