Directors – Daphne Matziaraki, Peter Murimi – 2024 – US, Kenya, Greece – Cert. 12a – 94m
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Disagreements in Kenya between indigenous, pastoralist herdsmen and white immigrant farmers come to a head during a severe drought exacerbated by climate change – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th
Shot mostly between 2017 and 2019 – so before the COVID pandemic – this is a brave attempt to relate two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable sides to a specific conflict.
Laikipia is a large, wildlife conservation area of Kenya, and the film was made some 60 or so years after Kenyan independence.
On the one hand, indigenous Kenyan tribesmen have been grazing their herds of goats and cattle on the land, simply wandering around and letting the animals graze at any suitable pasture they find. There is no concept of land ownership, except the unspoken idea that this is their country and this is therefore their land, which seems reasonable enough.
On the other hand, the early part of the twentieth century saw white British settlers awarded large areas of land to set up farms on the more profitable, Western capitalist business model. These people have now lived in the country and run their farms as enclosed ranches for some four generations.… Read the rest