ONE WOMAN ONE BRA is a stealthily devastating film. For long stretches, Vincho Nchogu’s feature debut gently pokes fun at the absurdities observed from its rural setting. However, its many strands come together to have a heartbreaking impact and show the effect of a community abandoning its most vulnerable members. Sarah Karei’s versatile, layered performance is an asset that Nchogu utilises to the fullest.
Karei leads as Star, a young woman who, being unmarried and orphaned, has not received the deeds to the land she lives on, unlike her peers and neighbours. In an attempt to gather the money to purchase it herself outright, Star concocts various schemes. In doing so, she navigates the local women’s prejudiced perceptions of her, a slightly self-serving aid organisation (with which she progresses the One Woman One Bra initiative from which the film derives its title), and a possible romantic entanglement with a childhood friend.
Star is an outsider, and Nchogu establishes this in a highly effective, if perhaps obvious, way in the film’s opening shot. Starting with a wide shot of a congregation receiving land deeds in a hall, Nchogu slowly tracks in to a window, eventually framing Star, who peers in from outside: a part of the community, yet apart from it. The shot is an early example of Nchogu using visual signals to isolate Star. In one scene, Star is clad in yellow, while the queue to see her image as a child on a book cover is filled with every other woman draped in pink. More than once, Star rides off on her scooter into the distance, slowly disappearing into the vast landscape around her home in a manner that seems to symbolise her attempts to engage with her community.
“Sarah Karei’s versatile, layered performance is an asset that Nchogu utilises to the fullest.”
Tonally, the film is happy to awkwardly observe the absurdity of some of the interactions Star experiences. Her interaction with a shopkeeper, haggling over the price of trinkets she has made and the cost of the book featuring her childhood image, or photocopies thereof, is a joke that escalates gently whilst also foregrounding the transactional nature of the relationships around her. Her visit to an NGO establishes a strand in which the organisation seems more preoccupied with being seen to help than with actually doing so. Her first visit crescendos in an interaction with an oblivious white foreigner insisting they “bond as women”, in a way that punctures the pomposity of self-important activism divorced from the reality of those it seeks to help.
“…gently comedic moments go a long way to disguising the ramping desperation of Star’s situation.”
These gently comedic moments go a long way to disguising the ramping desperation of Star’s situation. When she confronts the photographer of the book in his home, seeking whether the faceless adult she is pictured with was family, the film once again throws ridicule – and disdain – at the man’s white saviour complex. However, the revelations within emphasise how abandoned Star is by all those who claim to be able to help or have her back. Even beyond Star’s overall story, ONE WOMAN ONE BRA finds some time to note microaggressions she experiences, as well as depicting more threatening ones she and other women experience in the pursuit of some degree of personal liberty.
The film then explodes into a powerful final scene in which Karei takes everything that has come before and vocalises Star’s desperation for a home, a community, love, or possessions; anything that will give her solace. Her delivery is an emotionally devastating illustration of the collapse of the brave facade she puts on in the face of abandonment.