Film and Restoration of Ruined Humanity: Judy Kibinge’s Something Necessary

Abstract

This paper reads Judy Kibinge’s film Something Necessary (2013) that engages with the infamous 2007/2008 post-election violence as a creative enterprise in a quest for the restoration of a ruined humanity. The paper argues that the film surmounts Kenya’s complex and perilous political matrix by underscoring the power embodied in individual responsibility to redemption of self and, consequently, others, in the midst of state and/ or societal atrocities. It also puts into perspective the ‘necessary’ ‘thing(s)’ that the film dwells on by identifying the implied ‘things’, pondering on why the film finds them unnameable, grappling with how necessary they are. This speaks to social justice, an important sustainable development goal (SDGs) in a country like Kenya. In the political conflict that the film dwells on, the youth were the major agents of atrocities while the underclass children, women, and the elderly members of society were the largest group on the receiving end. The paper points out that even though the film is cognisant of the need for youth economic empowerment to remake them into agents of transformation in their societies through constructive participation in income generating activities rather than their recourse to enforcing political vendettas for their ethnic political personages for a living, it champions social empathy as the most enduring empowerment strategy for the youth in volatile spaces. To this end, the paper highlights the film’s depictions of the centrality of human compassion and empathy in rebuilding a better multicultural world. Through portrayals of several youth’s positive changes in their moral personae, the film underpins the creative industry’s power in fostering a peaceful and prosperous society. Generally, the paper reads Kibinge’s Something Necessary as prototypical of the creative industry’s instrumental capacity to empower the youth both intellectually and morally