Michelle Lemuya Ikeny, the 15-year old star of the Kenyan film ‘Nawi’ is determined to spark conversations about child marriage.
Speaking to the BBC, the young star said not many people want to speak about it.
“I want the movie to spark conversations about this topic, because it’s really not something people want to talk about,” said Michelle Lemuya Ikeny.
She plays 13-year-old Nawi, the eponymous heroine of the coming-of-age film set in Turkana County where the UN says one in four girls are married before they are 18.
“So many of my friends have had to leave school, or never been to school because someone paid a dowry to marry them, so their fathers had married them off,” she says.
Michelle, who grew up in Turkana where the film was shot, kept these girls in mind when portraying Nawi’s emotions – a performance that won her a Kalasha award for Best Promising Actor last November.
Like all the local children who star in the film, she had never acted before. When she signed up for it, she thought she would just be appearing in a school drama.
“It has changed my life, but I don’t want it to change my personality,” the teenager says.
In the film, just after 13-year-old Nawi finds out that her exam results are top in the county, she hears that her father is selling her to a wealthy man named Shadrack in exchange for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats”.
Instead of accepting her fate, Nawi smears blood on her legs on her wedding night to fake a period and then runs away to pursue her dream of going to high school in the capital, Nairobi.
Her father and Shadrack are furious and try to follow her, but she manages to outsmart them with the help of her brother.
However, she than goes back home to Turkana to bravely confront them when she finds out that her new baby sister has been promised to Shadrack as a replacement bride.
There are many scenes which highlight how widespread child marriage is – and how it is accepted despite being against the law. According to Kenya’s 2014 Marriage Act, a person must be 18 years of age to marry.
In one scene, when Nawi’s classmate Zawari does not show up to the end-of year exam, the boys in the class joke that she is “busy making babies”.
The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, who won a writing competition launched by the German-Kenyan non-governmental organisation Learning Lions.
Cherotich says her own childhood was the inspiration for her first feature film script as she grew up Turkana.
When asked if the story is based on a single person, she becomes too emotional at first to answer – but then goes on to tell how her sister was forced into marriage at the age of 14.
By 15, her sister had given birth, but the child became sick and died while she was carrying it on her back.
“She ended up living a life that was not hers. A life that was designed by my parents and her husband. Those are things I wanted to change,” Cherotich tells the BBC.
Some backlash to the film is “very much expected” in Turkana, she says.
But to her delight she has already managed to change one person’s perspective when she watched an early video-link screening of Nawi with her uncle – a staunch supporter of child marriage.
“After about 55 minutes, his eyes were wet. So, he was crying. And I was rejoicing inside because I thought: ‘Now at least one man has been touched’,” she says.
“I realised the importance of storytelling, the power it has.”
Toby Schmutzler, one of the directors of Nawi, says everyone who worked on the film was passionate about the project, but the challenge now is to get the film seen.
“The message can be super beautiful but if no one sees the film then no one hears the message,” he says.
The film was screened at the UN headquarters in New York last month – and Kenya selected it for its Oscars submission, though it did not make it to last week’s shortlist.
Nonetheless, the directing team is heartened to be in talks for an international release in the US, Canada, Europe, Central Africa and Australia.
The film was released in Kenya late last year, and in Nairobi had one of the longest cinema runs ever of a locally produced movie.
Watch KBC’s interview with Toby Schmutzler.
