Mournful themes dominate in this varied collection of short documentaries, the most compelling of which follows those deported from
Britain to Jamaica
This collection of short films from the online documentary platform True Story has home and exile as its central themes – though the needle errs towards the latter across these five often mournful works.
The longest, at 37 minutes, Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s Breakfast in Kisumu is a seemingly affable conversation with her Kenyan father, Rok Ajulu, as he recounts his 20-year odyssey from being a student in Bulgaria to academia in the
UK and pan-African activism in Lesotho and beyond. But it becomes clear that he sacrificed family for the collective political struggle, and this is his estranged daughter’s attempt at recovering their relationship and her Luo heritage. Ajulu-Bushell collages their conversation with scraps of archival and found-style footage, but flips into a sobering formalism for a soothing final rapprochement with father, who died in 2016.