Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba

And then the draught begins, ruthless looters loom around and a grave case of famine takes over William’s village-the heartbreaking aftermath of which Ejiofor doesn’t sugar-coat. The corruption amid unsympathetic, power-hungry figures come into sharp focus during a political rally that quickly turns bloody. Outside, Ejiofor attentively places the Kamkwamba Farm into social and political context without ever abandoning our young hero. Inside his home, we observe what he sees and hears through doorways and windows-commonplace familial disagreements and one-upmanship between relatives, fretful financial discussions, the aforementioned forbidden affair, a loyal dog that would follow him to death, and so on. Throughout “The Wind,” Ejiofor paints a multifaceted portrait of William’s world. There, he meets the 8th grade American textbook Using Energy that would change the course of his and his town’s life. Kachigunda’s ( Lemogang Tsipa), cuts a deal with his teacher to use the school’s basic library in his own time. But the now dismissed, ever-ambitious William, with a cheeky threat to expose his sister Annie’s ( Lily Banda) secret love affair with the school tutor Mr. When unreliable weather and a land dispute threaten the crops and the longevity of their family farm, the Kamkwambas fall short of the funds to support William’s education at a local school. He fixes town folk’s broken radios to help out his family financially and spends much time in the village junkyard, collecting parts to build batteries and other necessary devices. We first meet William in 2001 as a curious-minded schoolboy with a love of electronics. Through the sun-baked, dust-covered colors of the territory vividly shot by Dick Pope, “The Wind” sympathetically traces and builds William as he tackles the endless string of problems in front of him one at a time. He sees the mostly self-taught teen William ( Maxwell Simba, in an impressive breakthrough performance) on equal footing with the hard-bitten heroes of sea and space adventures, equipped only with smarts and a will to rise above the hostile conditions that surround him. More than anything, Ejiofor treats his film not as a fairy tale, but as a life-or-death survival story. This is thanks in large part to Ejiofor’s loving attention to the region’s cultural and geographic specificities and refusal of downplaying the hardships that slowly and fatally fatigue Kamkwamba’s village in Wimbe qualities that also elevated Mira Nair’s accomplished and similarly-themed “ Queen of Katwe”. While good natured and comfortingly conventional, “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind,” adapted from Kamkwamba’s autobiography by Ejiofor, is far from a forgettable, paint-by-numbers child prodigy film.

Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba