About this event
Film screening and discussion facilitated by Dr Gem Aellah, (BSMS Social Science for Stigmatising Skin Diseases Foundation), with a Q and A with some of those involved in the making of the film (via Zoom).
Film: ‘Atieno’ (2018) Directed by June Ndinya Effie Awino, Ruth Njoki, Lavine Atieno, Dorcas Akin. 64 minutes, Dholuo/English/Sheng/Swahili with English Subtitles.
For this month’s Social Science forum, we are screening a unique Dholuo language feature film, which has only been shown once before in the UK. Atieno is a collaborative fiction film scripted, acted, and directed by DreamGirls, a group of adolescent girls and young women from Nairobi and Kisumu. The film tells of Atieno, a 16-year-old girl from a sleepy fishing village. Family circumstances force her to go work for her aunt Bertha in Nairobi and send money home. In Nairobi, Atieno discovers that the job aunt Bertha has for her is working at a bar, where she gets harassed by the clients. She has a big fight with Bertha and moves out. She eventually does odd jobs for a living before she sets up a small business with her friends. The film is used by the Kenyan Community Media Trust as an educational outreach tool to facilitate discussions about HIV, transactional sex, and entrepreneurship. It also brings sharply into focus the tensions between structural constraints and individual agency that people living in resource-limited, high disease prevalent situations, must navigate in the search for a good health and a good life.
After the film screening, the audience will be asked to discuss the film’s open ended final and imagine how the characters will develop. There will also be a chance to talk to some of those involved making the film (via Zoom).
The event is facilitated by BSMS 5S Foundation Research Fellows: Dr Gem Aellah, who carried out her ethnographic PhD research in the same location as the film. Those interested might like to read Gem’s paper as a companion piece, as it concentrates on the lives of men living with HIV in the same place and time-period.
Booking not required. This event is open to all.