The Kenyan actress marries a baby in Nawi

The fifteen -year -old star of the film about students who is forced to marry an elderly man is evangelist in terms of her role – despite the fact that her community in northwestern Kenya could see this as a betrayal and treat her as an exterior.

“I want the movie to encourage conversations about this topic, because it’s not something people want to talk about,” Michelle Lemuya Ikeny says for the BBC.

She plays the 13-year-old Nawi, the heroine of the film of the movie about growing up in the Turkan district, a rural area bordering Uganda and where, according to the UN, every fourth girl marries before she is 18 years old.

“So many of my friends had to leave school or never had been at school because someone paid for the dowry to marry them, so their fathers married them,” she says.

Michelle, who grew up in Turkani where the movie was shot, was in mind by these girls when she showed Nawa’s emotions – the performance that she brought her award of the African Film Academy for Best Actor, which she promises, last November.

Like all local children who play in the movie, she has never starred before. When she signed up, she thought she would just show up in the school drama.

“My life has changed, but I don’t want to change my personality,” says the teenager.

In the movie, just after 13-year-old Nawi learns that her results are the best in the district in the district, she hears that her father is selling a rich man named Shadrack in exchange for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats”.

Instead of reconciling with her fate, Nawi’s first wedding night roasted blood on her feet to fake the menstrual period, then flee to realize her dream of going to high school in the capital of Nairobi.

Her father and Shadrack are furious and trying to follow her, but with the help of her brother she manages to outsmart them.

However, she then returns home to Turkan to courageously confront them when she learns that her new younger sister is promised to Shadracka as a replacement for the bride.

There are many scenes that emphasize how widespread child marriages are – and how they are accepted despite being opposed to the law. According to the 2014 Kenyan Law, a person must be 18 to get married.

In one scene, when Nawa’s colleague from Zawari’s class does not appear on the exam at the end of the year, the boys from the class joke that she was “busy making children.”

The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, who won the writing competition launched by the German-Kenyan non-governmental organization Learning Lions.

Cherotich says her own childhood was her inspiration for her first feature film as she grew up in Turkani.

When asked if the story is based on one person, at first she becomes too emotional to answer – but then she continues to talk that her sister was forced to marry at the age of 14.

Up to 15. The sister gave birth, but the baby fell ill and died as she wore it on her back.

“In the end, she lived a life that was not hers. The life designed by my parents and her husband. These are the things I wanted to change,” Cherotich tells the BBC.

A certain reaction to the movie is “very expected” in Turkani, she says.

But to her satisfaction, she was already able to change the perspective of one person when she watched the early screening of Nawi via a video connection with her uncle – an unwavering supporter of children’s marriages.

“After about 55 minutes, his eyes were moist. So, he cried. And I was looking forward to the inside because I thought, ‘Now at least one man is touched,'” she says.

“I understood the importance of storytelling, the power it has.”

Children’s marriages are far from being just a Kenyan problem – girls in Podsahar’s Africa are at the highest risk of children’s marriages in the world, and every third is married before the age of 18, according to the UN’s UNICEF Children’s Agency.

As part of the goals of the sustainable development of the UN, 2030 was set as a deadline for the complete abolition of children’s marriages, but UNICEF says that progress will have to be “significantly accelerated” in order to achieve this goal.

The prevalence decreases globally – today one of five women between the ages of 20 and 24 have been married as children compared to almost one in four years ago.

The fastest progress was achieved in southern Asia, where the risk of marrying a girl in childhood fell by more than a third.

But the recent UNICEFA report states that Western and Central Africa, a region with the highest prevalence of children’s marriages, have made little progress in the last 25 years. The current pace, it would take more than 200 years to eliminate this practice.

Toby Schmutzler, one of the director Nawi, says that everyone who worked on the film were passionate about the project, but now it is a challenge to watch the movie.

“The message may be super beautiful, but if no one sees the movie then no one will hear the message,” he says.

The film was screened at the UN headquarters in New York last month – Kenya chose it as an Oscar candidacy, although he did not enter last week’s election.

Nevertheless, the directorial team is delighted with the negotiations on international edition in the US, Canada, Europe, Central Africa and Australia.

The film was released in Kenya late last year, and in Nairobia he had one of the longest cinema screenings ever locally produced film.

In Turkani, Apuu Mourin, one of the Kenyan film directors, he organized free projections by Nawi at the Kakuma refugee camp.

She says the reaction was generally positive, although the audience was mostly made up of young people, so the team plans to organize a truck to display the film to the elderly in local villages and learn their reactions.

A new school has already been built in the joint initiative with Learning Lions, which has already enrolled 300 girls.

Schmutzler says this was welcomed by the Turkana Community, since the school is free to attend, and it also provides girls with meals in an area where there were a series of droughts that pushed many on the edge of hunger.

Michelle believes that if more people watch the movie, they will have the potential to change their lives.

“When you watch the movie, try to put yourself in the skin of Nawi, put yourself in the skin of all those 640 million girls,” she says.

“When you’re young, you have so many dreams. I have so many dreams. When someone comes and takes it away – it’s the worst feeling ever.”