LFF: Vincho Nchogu on making her first feature One Woman One Bra
Earlier this week, I had a lovely chat with Kenyan writer-director Vincho Nchogu about her feature directorial debut, One Woman One Bra, during the Filmmakers Afternoon Tea event during the London Film Festival.
Set in a rural village, the drama follows an orphaned and unmarried woman named Star (Sarah Karei) who faces a race against time to prove her family lineage and claim the deed to her land. Resorting to desperate measures, she signs a dubious deal with an NGO to make the awareness campaign One Woman One Bra.
During our brief sitdown, Nchogu revealed how quickly she had to turn around her project after being chosen by the Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema earlier this year.
How long, from the idea to now, have you been working on One Woman One Bra?
It’s crazy because this film went through the Venice Biennale cinema college programme. Basically, you send in ideas and then in October, they select 12 participants and then you go for a workshop in Venice. Then you go home and you write a script. From the 12 projects, they select four projects to fund, and my project was one of the selected projects. Then you get money at the end of January and you have to deliver the film in August.
Oh wow, that’s a really quick turnaround!
A really quick turnaround, and there’s so much pressure. You’re like just being cooked. It’s baptism by fire.
Yeah, definitely! That’s insane. And once you get the money, to be ready to go…
I know, while you apply for this, they’re like you’re getting 200,000 euros and that’s it, and that’s your budget, and you have to make the film within that amount. Anyway, you don’t have time to raise more money, you just have to go and do it. But I think it’s a great programme because they focus on process. So really they’re not like, make the best possible film, they’re like, just go through the motions, so that, especially for first-time filmmakers, you get it out of your system and then you can make your next film. I think it’s for first and second-time filmmakers. It’s such a good programme, I recommend it, but it’s a tough programme.
How did you find the village where you filmed the movie?
My casting director sent me a video to consider someone and I was watching it and I said, ‘Where is this?’ So I forgot to look at the actor, like, ‘I need to know where you filmed this.’ And he told me it’s actually in Kenya because I didn’t believe it. I’m from Kenya and I’ve never seen somewhere so beautiful and I’ve been to many, many places in Kenya as a film producer. I flew to Nairobi, I met Nick Reding, who plays William Whitman in the film, and he connected me to Amos (Leuka), who plays the Chief, and we dropped down to the village and matched with Amos but it was too far and we were like, ‘We’re not going to film here.’ But it ended up working, and we were there and they’re now our friends who made the film together.
I read that the local community were involved in the film.
Very much involved… Our production designer went solo to this place. The house – the set – was built by the woman of the village… So it was really like it was their film.
And most of the cast in your film are non-professionals, right?
Yes, but they love drama. I was telling someone that they were already performing so they were not performing for the first time. There’s a village theatre where they go from one community to the next, performing issues or like things they want the community to talk about. They write music. So if you saw the end credits, their chants, we recorded them, then we took the recording to a composer who then incorporated that. But they really do that, they really make their own music and do their own performances… Some of them were acting for the first time on screen. The lead had been in two NGO dramas so they kind of had a little bit of experience but (for) a lot of them, it was the first time.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
One Woman One Bra is showing at the London Film Festival. No release date yet