Deschutes Public Library

Kenya / Faces of Change collection

videorecording

Kenya / Faces of Change collection

945752795

Originally produced by Documentary Educational Resources in 1974

121

"The core of this series is Kenya Boran 1 and 2, each designed to stand alone, but which together complement one another in a most useful and informative fashion. Their common subject matter is the development problems posed for rural Boran herdsmen and their families by the encroachment upon their once-isolated grazing lands of a growing town (Marsabit) and a major road (the new Nairobi-Addis Ababa Highway). These are shown in Kenya Boran 1, as two fathers and their sons discuss difficult choices between old and new ways of responding to the complexity of changes occurring around them, each emphasizing different aspects of the problem and different strategies for confronting them which, in turn, promote view specultaiton as to the appropriateness and the outcome of their divergent ways of dealing with change. Kenya Boran 2 expands upon these themes by focusing on the life of Peter Boru, a 16 year old former herdsboy who has gone to the government boarding school in the town; his expression of his hopes, fears and aspirations is adroitly contrasted both with those of his unschooled neighbors in the rural cattle camps and with the bleak employment opportunities facing him in the modern secotr, in the course of which some of the difficulties of existing national educational practices in promoting development are isolated and explored. The hallmark of both films is their earnest commitment to permitting the Boran to define the issues that confront them in their own vernacular terms, expertly subtitled without the imposition of directed interpretative commentary.... The overall result is a series of remarkably intimate and realistic scenes, attractively films with an absence of conspicuous staging aor obvious show-biz; indeed, they move with a natural rhythm and pace that engenders an authentic sense of the problems, and of the sorts of ideas and feelings that individual Boran bring to bear in deciding on appropriate response to change. .... The prevailing tone of both films is their seriousness and deliberate instructional intent to provoke analytic responses from viewers. Their principal value lies in presenting the evidence in such a fashion as to force viewers to arrive at their own conslusions about the course of action that seems most appropriate based on the film/essay evidence...." - Alan Jacobs, Western Michigan University, American Anthropologist, 1977

live action