CinemAfrica 2013: Flourescent Sin Challenges Kenyan Attitudes to Sexuality and ‘otherness’

Flourescent Sin Challenges Kenyan Attitudes to Sexuality and ‘otherness’

At Nairobi’s iconic central station, a lithe, majestic drag queen sits on a bench, lightly crying, smoking a cigarette and descending into a breakdown through a poetic soliloquy.

This project was a result of a CollabFeature initiative that brought independent filmmakers from all across the globe together to collaborate on multi-director feature films. In Swahili, a woman observing the drag queen’s breakdown leans over and says, “whoever he is, he’s not worth your tears”.

At Nairobi’s iconic central station, a lithe, majestic drag queen sits on a bench, lightly crying, smoking a cigarette and descending into a breakdown through a poetic soliloquy. In Swahili, a woman observing the drag queen’s breakdown leans over and says, “whoever he is, he’s not worth your tears”. In only a few minutes, filmmaker Amirah Tajdin challenges and plays on our preconceptions about beauty, sexuality, and Kenyan attitudes to ‘otherness’ in a film that suggests being caught between two places might in fact not be a terrible thing.

Read more about Tajdin’s current projects here, where she deals with conflict brought about by interracial relationships, and here, where she tackles the subject of grief and nostalgia as a Kenyan man struggles to deal with painful memories of his and others’ resistance efforts to colonialism.