(Left: Still
from “Each Night I Dream” in “Stories of Our Lives”)
Tonight (May 22) at 19h00, the Institute
for Creative Arts (ICA) in partnership with the Nest Collective will present an
online screening of Nest’s extraordinary film Stories of Our Lives. The screening will take place on the ICA
Stories of Our Lives Film Screening Facebook Page.
Straight after the screening, join the live
Q&A which will be chaired by ICA Director Jay Pather, featuring Stories of
Our Lives director Jim Chuchu and screenwriter Njoki Ngumi, as well as artist
and theatre-maker Mwenya Kabwe, and arts journalist Carl Collison.
Stories
of Our Lives is a series of five vignettes – Ask Me Nicely, Run, Athman, Duet and Each Night I Dream – fictionalised renderings of personal stories
collected from persons identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and
intersex in Kenya, during the Stories of
Our Lives project. The Nest Collective writes of the work:
“After several months of touring and
collecting hundreds of vivid, compelling stories, we decided to turn some of
these stories into short films. We wrote the scripts based on some of the
stories we’d recorded, and we shot the films over the course of eight months
using ourselves as the crew. The resulting shorts were strung together into [Stories of Our Lives]: an anthology film
based on true stories about queer life in Kenya...”
This film screening event forms part of a
broader project, The Feminine and the Foreign, which is a collaboration between
the Nest Collective, the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT,
London) and the ICA. The Feminine and the Foreign seeks to engage with
feminist, queer and immigration activist communities in multiple cities around
the world searching for the ideological, spiritual, emotional and philosophical
links between them. The project will result in a series of short films that
encapsulate a multi-city dialogue about the push-back against global forces
that seek to sequester, separate and incapacitate minority communities.
In partnership with the British Council,
the Nest Collective was scheduled to visit South Africa to develop the Feminine
and the Foreign project, beginning with conducting interviews with Cape
Town-based activists. This project has been postponed for now.
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