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FEATURE IN FOCUS W
“what we weren’t after: we
didn’t want to make a Last King Of Scotland or a Constant Gardener. We
certainly wanted to do something as good as those films, but one that was as truthful and honest as possible to our own story.”
He’s talking about The First INANDOUTGrader, written by Ann Peacock and
directed by Justin Chadwick, who made The Other Boleyn Girl and the BBC’s BAFTA-winning Bleak House.
Set in 2003, the year Kenya declared universal and free elementary education for all, The First Grader tells the true story of Maruge (newcomer Oliver Litondo, a one-time TV anchorman), an octogenarian ex Mau Mau freedom fighter desperate to read and write, and his inspirational teacher Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris).
Runner-up for the Cadillac People’s Choice Award at Toronto and selected for a Gala Screening at this year’s Bfi London Film Festival, the life-affirming tale first came to the fore in a 2006 documentary, The First Grader: The True Story of Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge.
“One of the main differences between our film and the ones I mentioned before is that ours doesn’t, for a change, involve a white Western European lead character as some sort of hook, which often stories set in Africa do: in fact, the majority do.
“The First Grader is purely a Kenyan story, has mostly a Kenyan cast and we tried to utilise everything as Kenyan as possible. Apart from my First AC Jennie Paddon and the grip Sam Phillips, the rest of my and his crew
were Kenyan.
“What we were trying essentially to do from the outset was to present a modern Kenya. It wasn’t just about showing Africa to the Western world but perhaps even more for us about making a film Kenyans would want to see too,” says Hardy.
“One of the big discussions I had with Justin, whom I hadn’t worked with before, was: how do we tell the truth but, at the same time how do we create it in a cinematic way rather than just documentary style?”
The locations themselves very much dictated their approach almost from the moment Hardy stepped off the plane in Nairobi, which would be utilised for the urban elements of the story.
“At first I found the idea of going to Kenya quite daunting. I had been to North Africa for fun and South Africa for work but for me, this part of Africa was an unknown quantity. Then I arrived and everywhere you looked, everything you saw had so much going on and so much
OFAFRICA
FROM KENYA’S GREAT RIFT VALLEY - SHOOTING THE FIRST GRADER - TO THE ANCIENT CITY OF SHKODRA ON ALBANIA’S
REMOTE NORTH WEST BORDER, IT’S BEEN AN EPIC, GLOBE-TROTTING YEAR FOR
DP ROB HARDY BSC
Photo main: a classroom scene with Oliver Litondo as Maruge and Naomie Harris as Jane Obinchu in The First Grader; above l-r: a scene from Joshua Marston’s Untitled Albanian Project and DP Rob Hardy BSC
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e knew,” says Rob Hardy,
character. Yes, you had dangerous elements but also there was the incredible friendliness of the people.
“Cinematographically, it clearly had huge potential. Justin had this idea at first we’d just travel around in a van, jump out, shoot some stuff and then jump back in again. So there’d be times when we were going through towns and villages filming on the streets, and the response was great. They were either fascinated by what we were doing or else actually want to become part of it.
“Mind you, there were other times when we did get worried that someone might machete off our arms to get to the camera! It was a good mix of vibrancy.”
Key to the filming was finding
a suitable remote rural school location. The original, Kapkenduiywo Primary School in , wasn’t considered cinematic enough so after careful scouting, the filmmakers eventually lucked into Oloserian School on the periphery of the Rift Valley.
Hardy recalls: “In this one horse town on the road to Mombasa, the school sat on a hilltop framed one side by the Ngong Hills [of Out Of Africa fame] and on the other by the great expanse of the valley. It was stunning and windswept, like some- thing out of a Sergio Leone movie.”
Constructing a classroom based on the original in the grounds of the school, they spent four weeks shooting there, the first week or so of which was spent getting to know, and being trusted by, the children and staff, some of whom would be used in the film.
Hardy, who’d become known as “Teacher Rob”, said the classroom presented its own special problems: “The sun would go straight over the top so I asked for them to put some transparent corrugated sections on it. Then we’d build frames to go over those transparent sections just depending on where the sun was at that point and on the sort of mood we wanted in the classroom at any particular time.
“Luckily the weather wasn’t specified in the script. At the school, because we were so close to the mountains, the clouds would suddenly come down. The sky cleared roughly around 7am when we started shooting; the heat was then searing between 10am and 4pm after which it would became a dustbowl.
“The clouds were generally nice and even but in fact I almost preferred the weather when it was slightly dowdier. It had a real
mood to it and was very painterly at times.”
To capture the ‘look’, Hardy, using not just one but two of the then new-fangled 2-Perf Aaton Penelope cameras often stripped down further for intimacy and