One Woman One Bra and one non-message film with a message

Daniel Nelson

The title of One Woman One Bra comes from a conversation between an awkward meeting between a gung-ho Western NGO worker and a desperate landless villager, Star.

The funder hits on the idea that Masai women need breast rather than financial support and seizes on the bewildered Star’s campaign name suggestion.

Like almost every other move the energetic and enterprising Star makes in an attempt to raise money for the documents she needs to claim the title deeds to the land on which she lives, it ends in embarrassing disaster.

Star, however, never gives up. After spotting pictures of her younger self in a coffee table World Book on Nomads, tracks down the photographer to ask him if he remembers her mother. She even proposes marriage to a friend, because a husband will give her the required status.

As an orphan of unknown parents, unmarried at 38 and childless, she already lives on the edges of her society, so when her various ruses fail, the villagers turn on her.

That’s when the film turns from warm, lively comedy about an intelligent, feisty, independent woman’s attempts to solve her own problems into a chilling moment when the village women turn into a greedy mob to loot the little she owns.

It’s hugely entertaining, and indirectly has a lot to say about identity and community, tradition and modernity, land ownership and women’s rights.

In the words of writer and director Vincho Nchogu, “What began as a political commentary evolved into a feminist narrative.”

In an interview with Variety, she said she got her start working for a non-profit organisation, making what she now regards as “propaganda films” and her African subjects would often “suppress their personal narratives to conform to the organisation’s salvation myth … There’s more money [in East Africa] if you make an issue-based film. Then the question becomes: Are we telling the stories that we really want to tell, or is the funding dictating the stories we tell?”

This film is made by a Kenyan director with a producer and cinematographer who are Nigerians, and 70 per cent of the cast and crew hail from the village of Nkosesia, on the Kenyan border with Tanzania.