David “Tosh” Gritonga’s Nairobi Half Life is one of the most successful Kenyan films. It was nominated for nine awards at the African Movie Academy Awards, was the first Kenyan film considered by the Oscars (in the Best Foreign Language Feature category), won an audience award from the American Film Institute, won a Best Actor award for Jospeh Wairui from the Durban Film Festival, has been an official selection at several international film festivals, has been screened in more than one hundred theaters in the U.S., and has had a long run in Kenyan cinemas.

The film tells the story of Mwas (Jospeh Wairui), a young Kenyan villager. He earns a meager living selling DVDs but his dream is to become an actor. He travels to Nairobi for a chance to perform in a theater troupe, but within minutes of arriving is robbed of all of his possessions and falsely imprisoned. Once out of prison Mwas begins to live a double life. He auditions for and wins a part at the theater while stealing cars to support himself. He performs with serious artists and gets rich by working with serious criminals. The duality cannot hold, however, and soon the consequences of his criminality threaten to destroy both parts of his life. After a brutal incident Mwas is imprisoned by corrupt policemen and narrowly escapes being killed. Having nearly missed the opening curtain of his play, he dashes through the streets to the theater. Arriving in time, he gives a heartfelt performance as a burglar with a conscience who breaks into the homes of the rich to highlight social injustices to the wealthy. Mwas’s character is shot in the back by the police as he flees the scene of the robbery while the real Mwas, with cuts and bruises still visible from his real police escape, takes a curtain call.

Nairobi Half Life begins with an announcement of its genealogy as Mwas melodramatically reenacts the death of Bill at the ending of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) to entice a group of gangsters to buy a bootleg DVD of the film. The scene acts as an homage to Tarantino and foreshadows the violence of this film, but it also represents an articulation of difference. Mwas changes the plot in his retelling so that Bill himself, rather than Bill’s and Beatrix’s trainer, teaches Beatrix the secret technique she uses to kill him. This slight but significant rewriting announces that while Nairobi Half Life certainly leans on the traditions of American gangster films, it intends to bring a distinctly Kenyan sense to the genre.

Pinning down the particularly Kenyan contribution, though, is difficult. The film was made possible in large part by the involvement of Tom Tykwer (the director of Run, Lola, Run [1998] and Cloud Atlas [2012]) and his One Fine Day Film Workshop, funded by the German government and several German cultural institutes. One Fine Day seeks to professionalize the African film industry (in contrast to Nollywood, one senses), and there is no doubt that the film has the trappings of contemporary world cinema. The lighting, sound, and production values are world class, and the use of tracking shots, crane shots, steadicam shots, long shots, and close-ups makes the film visually appealing, even in comparison to much larger budget films. In short, it is a textbook film demonstrating various contemporary filming and editing techniques, perhaps most visibly in a climactic scene in which Mwas escapes from the corrupt cops and rushes to the National Theatre for the opening curtain. The scene bears striking similarities to Run, Lola, Run as Mwas runs through the streets of Nairobi, with the film oscillating between telephoto lens images that isolate him as the city blurs past to wide-angle shots that contextualize him in various neighborhoods to highlight his speed and determination in an already hectic city. The film serves here as a fine showpiece for the potential of African and Kenyan cinema, although the achievement is largely technical. The plot plays itself out as a somewhat boilerplate story of ambitious and naïve young men turning to crime (such as, e.g., City of God [2002] and Tsotsi [2005]) but uses distinct locales such as the iconic Kenya Cinema Palace and the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi.

Ironically, despite all of the technical virtuosity and focus on formal filmic composition, the film ends with a performance of a play on a small and simple theater stage. As in the opening, Mwas is performing, but now instead of romanticizing the violence of films, he says, “Have we chosen this our life? Have we decided to be the way we are or have we decided to look away from everything that is around us? . . . It is a choice: to look or to look away.” Mwas recognizes his own culpability in the lines he is speaking while challenging viewers to understand the complexities and motivations behind the corruption, criminality, and violence of Nairobi. The content of the play within a play exerts its influence directly on the narrative only in the film’s closing, but it poignantly highlights its self-reflexivity. The film begins with an homage to violence-driven cinema and ends up undermining the callousness of that violence while adding depth by exposing the conditions that foster it. In terms of Mwas’s character in the play, Nairobi Half Life looks abroad at times by mimicking straightforward Hollywood-style gangster movies, while at other times it looks inward to problematize filmic violence. Ultimately Nairobi Half Life argues that the film must examine violence directly, in specific cultural contexts, rather than simply ignoring it.