PUMZI

PUMZI in kiswahili means air. it is also the name of a really great short film (20 minutes) i just watched, by wanuri kahiu. she's a kenyan film director. i saw gifs of pumzi on tumblr today (i think janelle monae would absolutely love the film) and thought hey this looks amazing lemme watch it so i did - after a couple of wanuri's interviews, like this really good one:

she talks about things that i think are really important, but that may be just because i can relate to them as a young african girl who only sees negative images of where she comes from in the media and wants to change it because she knows it's so biased and untrue in the sense that it's not the whole image. (lol it's fun to talk about myself in the third person.) anyway, for the same reasons i can relate to wanuri's film. i find it very beautiful and inspiring, though i understand it's not for everyone. like this "western white feminist from the united states".

i'm going to talk about why i love this film and why it's important okay. okay so first off, the protagonist is called asha, which means life in swahili. she is a young african female scientist. she is a dreamer and is intelligent and is determined. it's not very often that positive images like this are put out for africans, and i think we need to know what we are capable of as a people, but more importantly that our validation must come from within ourselves. for me this is the message that asha represents and it was clear to me from the beginning of the film. she is inquisitive and sensitive and intuitive, which is a lot like me and part of why i really like asha. her society and superiors try to combat or even kill her nature but she rises above it. it seems like it wouldn't be easy to ignore messages like you are not qualified to determine that and take your dream suppressants, but asha makes it seem like it is. she's saying that really you just have to be who you are and do whatever you think is necessary because there are no barriers (which is a message i took from the book 'we need to talk about kevin'). :-)
there's so much more i could say, but i think this film is best watched with an open mind, so you can form your own conclusions. i'm going to tell my friends about it because i love it so much and i plan to watch it at least once more this weekend. and maybe i'll watch beasts of the southern wild again too. :-)