Cannes adopts the abandoned Kenyan baby

A long standing ovation was garnered at Festival de Cannes on Wednesday by a little film--Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki (Friend). Abandoned by its home country Kenya where it has been banned for its portrayal of a lesbian relationship, Rafiki appears to have been lovingly adopted by the festival with the artistic director Thierry Fremaux applauding spiritedly along with the rest in the packed Salle Debussy theatre.

At its screening Ms Kahiu said that even though what has been happening in Kenya is heart-breaking, they are proud to be Kenyans and hoped that the film will make the audience fall in love with the country. Indeed it is the presence and performance of the little known cast specially the two young leading ladies--Samantha Mugatsia (Kena) and Sheila Munyiva (Ziki)--that lends freshness to Rafiki. Otherwise it hardly breaks any new ground when it comes to the LGBTQIA cinema. If Call Me By Your Name was criticised for too little sex,Rafiki has almost none. In fact there is an overwhelming innocence and purity about the lovers. It’s like any other sweet teenage romance complete with a love at first sight moment.

Another little film from Egypt, Abu Bakr Shawky’s Yomeddine (Judgement Day) is an interesting idea lost in execution. Beshay, a man cured of leprosy (played by non-professional Rady Gamal among others in the cast) goes in search of the family that abandoned him. Giving him company is an orphan boy. Some genuinely affecting moments--Beshay crying out in public that he is a human being--get sidelined in the familiar, manipulative “triumph of the underdog” arc. The garbage heap, the many states of being outcastes--leprosy, mental illness, begging industry, orphans--seems constructed than organic. Then there is the utterly problematic finale in which, despite the sympathy for the protagonist, the filmmaker comes back a full circle to segregation than inclusivity.

Director Wanuri Kahiu of "Rafiki" poses with actors Sheila Munyiva and Samantha Mugatsia at 71st Cannes Film Festival in France, on May 9, 2018.   | Photo Credit: REUTERS

Rafiki and Yomeddine are not the only underdogs that Cannes is championing this year. Set in Leningrad of the 80s, Leto (Summer) a beautifully presented black and white slice of Russian rock culture scene in the Brezhnev era, has been directed by Kirill Serenbrennikov, currently under house arrest in Russia, just like another Palme d’Or contender, Iran’s Jafar Panahi.

Leto takes the audience on a nostalgic musical trip of sorts and also into the heart of a unique triangular love story, based on the memoirs of Natalia Naumenko and the two men in her life, her musician husband Mike of the Zoopark group and her lover, songwriter Viktor Tsoi of the group Kino.

The cinematic strength of the former USSR seems to shine bright this year, as it did in 2017. Apart from Leto, the inaugural film of the Un Certain Regard section, Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass has been the strongest, political sledgehammer of a film seen so far. Just like his Krotkaya (A Gentle Creature) last year, Donbass is a heightened, off the wall, dystopian vision, in this case of Donbass, the site of the war between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government. The everyday banal violence, the perennial explosions, the sudden deaths and omnipresent menace, bribery and corruption, oppressive systems and fascists regimes--watching it is like going on a suffocating trip to hell.

Loznitsa’s film starts off with a compelling beginning that comes a full circle to the long, gut-wrenching climactic sequence, one of the best you would have seen in a recent film.