“Ciak! Kibera” is the project that gave life to a short film shot through the streets of one of the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, located in Nairobi, Kenya. Its plot is made of dreams.
Titus is a boy with an incredible power: by "giving a fist bump" — the typical greeting among young people — he is able to "catch" dreams. On one of his walks through the Kibera slum, one of the largest in the world and the largest in Nairobi, Kenya, he managed to collect and make come true the dreams of an aspiring astronaut, a rock star, a group of aspiring superheroes and, finally, acrobats. This is the plot of the short film Bisu Ndoto, two words from two different languages — Sardinian and Swahili respectively — with the same meaning: "dream".
Sardinian, like the language of the association Cherimus (which means "we desire", "we want"). Swahili, like the language of the group of children and young people born and raised in Kibera who took part in the almost unplanned filming of the short film made using stop-motion technique. The aim of the Ciak! Kibera project, coordinated by Cherimus and funded by the autonomous region of Sardinia, was not simply the making of a video, but rather the creation of an artist residency inside the slum, as envisioned by the founders of the Sardinian association: Emiliana Sabiu, Matteo Rubbi and Marco Colombaioni, a volunteer and artist who trained at the Accademia di Brera, who passed away prematurely in 2011. After numerous trips to Kenya, Marco's wish was to give new opportunities to the young people living in the slum, through art.
The true dream, then, is the creation of an itinerant artist residency, which has been given the name Darajart — meaning "bridge between cultures" (from the fusion of the words "daraja", meaning bridge in Swahili, and "art") — and which is currently hosted by one of the rehabilitation centres for former street children, the Kivuli centre in Nairobi, run by the Koinonia Community association in Nairobi together with the NGO Amani from Milan. And the hope is that Ciak! Kibera will be just the first stop on this journey.
Thanks to this web of relationships, the 20 young people who took part in the various workshops over recent months transformed themselves into screenwriters, costume designers, set designers and actors, guided by volunteers such as Alberto Colzani, a designer from Milan who followed the project directly and was interviewed by LifeGate: "At the start of the artistic workshops there was no intention yet to make a video," Colzani recalls, "the idea came when the aspirations and imagination of the young people allowed us to understand that art and its social function could take shape as something concrete."
The short film then also gave rise to a documentary written by Guido Bosticco and Andrea Canepari (who also directed it), entitled Bisu Ndoto. Il sogno di Kibera, which tells, through the words of its protagonists, the daily life that unfolds — full of obstacles — inside the slum, as well as its formidable creative energy, while at the same time showing how the short film was made.
And the soundtrack, too, is the result of an artistic project that culminated in the creation of an album and a limited-edition vinyl (350 copies), which brings together the artistic sensibilities of the young people of Kibera, fusing them with the Sardinian sounds of Francesco Medda, known as "Arrogalla," who wrote the music and lyrics. On one side of the 45 rpm record is the music that serves as the short film's soundtrack; on the other, listeners can hear the "soundscape" — the sonic landscape of the slum recorded in the early hours of the morning.
An hour that is already "charged" for those who every day must struggle and invent something new, taking on the challenges that a place like Kibera poses to its inhabitants. You have to be a little like superheroes in reverse. If Spider-Man's uncle said that "with great power comes great responsibility," the young people of Bisu Ndoto have understood that reality is a little different for them: it is from great responsibility that great power is born. And their imagination is the greatest power of all.