War­riors

This nobly inten­tioned doc­u­men­tary from Bar­ney Dou­glas com­bines the sto­ry of a group of pro­gres­sive young­sters out to chal­lenge per­ni­cious cus­toms in their Kenyan vil­lage, with a love let­ter to the game of cricket.

Sony­on­ga is the con­sci­en­tious young cap­tain of the Maa­sai War­riors crick­et team, who respects the elders of his vil­lage for their long­stand­ing rela­tion­ship with the land but dis­agrees with their prac­tise of female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion (FGM). He believes crick­et can play an impor­tant role in edu­cat­ing the elders, who are ini­tial­ly intro­duced argu­ing that a ​“Ntup­pa” (uncir­cum­cised girl) is hard­er to mar­ry off.

Their unen­light­ened claims on women’s rights are inter­cut through­out the first half of the film with insights sourced from oth­er res­i­dents of the vil­lage who are opposed to the con­tro­ver­sial pol­i­cy. These include the head­teacher of a local girl’s school, who asks rhetor­i­cal­ly: ​“If FGM con­tin­ues, how will arranged mar­riage be stopped? What the girls don’t have is their abil­i­ty to choose.” By found­ing a gen­der-inclu­sive crick­et club two kilo­me­tres from the vil­lage, Sony­on­ga and his team­mates find an unusu­al way to chal­lenge the sta­tus quo.

The film loose­ly doc­u­ments the team’s jour­ney to par­take in an ama­teur tour­na­ment at Lord’s Crick­et Ground, where they play bare­foot and in tra­di­tion­al hunt­ing gear. Ben Wilkins’ cin­e­matog­ra­phy jux­ta­pos­es breath­tak­ing aer­i­al footage of the expan­sive African plains against crane shots of the Eng­lish crick­et­ing hub and the urban archi­tec­ture of cen­tral Lon­don, which looks alien in contrast.

The film occa­sion­al­ly for­gets itself, cast­ing the issue of FGM aside in order to rev­el in the boys’ expe­ri­ences as tourists. The role of the sport itself is a lit­tle sen­sa­tion­alised, with Dou­glas clear­ly get­ting car­ried away chron­i­cling the tour­na­ment so that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the doc­u­men­tary con­sists of mun­dane mon­tages over­laid with dubi­ous pop music.