The film Mother is a story about how theatre maker Elena Panayo enabled orphans in both Kenya and Bulgaria to dream again

The film screening hosted by the Bulgarian Embassy in South Africa at Ster-Kinekor in Rosebank on Saturday, is a beautiful piece of art melding both fiction and reality to tell a powerful story of how theatre can be used as therapy to heal the afflicted in society.

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

When I got an invitation from the Bulgarian Embassy to go watch a Bulgarian produced film titled Mother, an even the Embassy of Bulgaria hosted at Ster-Kinekor, Rosebank on Saturday, October 21, 2023, a film that is part of the just ended (on Sunday, October 22, 2023) European Film Festival, I readily accepted the invitation. There are several reason for this, top on the list being the fact that the embassy had indicated that the director Zornitsa Sophia was going to attend. The government of Bulgaria was going to fly her all the way to South Africa to witness the reception the film would get from audiences here. This is something that perhaps our Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, or the Department of International Affairs must take a leaf from. I mean this is the art of cultural diplomacy at its best.

However little did I know that I and the other audience members that comprised of invited guests and ordinary film lovers who filed to cinema 4, were going to get more than what we had bargained for.

This is because at the end of the run of this beautifully directed film, telling a touching story of love and empathy that some people in society display toward the plight of orphans, the Bulgarian Ambassador to South Africa, shortly after being introduced by the festival’s curator Magdalene Moonsammy, in turn introduced two special guests. Besides Sophia, there in person was none other than the Elena Panayo herself. Elena is the theatre maker whose real life story of empathy and hard work, she put in turning the lives orphans around.

He transformed among the orphans in real life, a life of hopelessness, and the inability to dream for a better future among orphans in both Bulgaria and Kenya, into an inspirational story. She used her skills as a playwright to turn the lives of these kids into something special, admirable and inspirational. She did this with spectacular success, using a genre of theatre called Applied Theatre. This is a genre that provides therapy to broken souls to see a bright future beyond the ruins of pain and deprivation that populate their environment.

What is painful and great at the same time about this film, is the fact that although it is a work of fiction, and it works well when looked at that way, that is only partly true. This is because a good, and I mean, a really big chunk of it is documentary. It is a reality faced by children in both Kenya and Bulgaria who find themselves without parents and are in orphanages for different reasons, such as being abandoned or because of the death of their parents. This is sad in that behind the facade of fiction being embedded in this movie lie true stories of reality. For example, some of the actors, especially those that represent the part of the film shot in Kenya, actually features actual children from an orphanage from a ghetto called Kibera in Kenya.

The story of helplessness and hopelessness turned into a story of hope and dreams, is real in this film. One boy, an orphan called Jomo, who is featured in the film as him, was saved by being picked from a rubbish dump, where stray dogs were lingering to feed on him. After his life was saved and he was given a home in an orphanage, he first struggled to speak because of the trauma of his dire circumstances. But through theatre therapy, not only did he regain his voice to speak, but his dreams as well.

Asked on camera what his dreams were, he simply answered: “I want to be a pilot.” Prompted further to elaborate by the director, he added,” to fly planes.” He said this while pointing to the sky. And he is only seven. Now here is a youngster who not only could he not speak before, but who did not even know that there is such thing as dreaming, but who after receiving theatre therapy wants to take to the skies. And to cap it all, he gets a film role to play himself.

“The story of this boy touched me so much that I insisted on casting him as him. And guess what, my secret that got him to open up and speak eventually – I got him to come to the production site every single day to play football with the crew,” Sophia told CITYLIFE/ARTDS in an interview.

Elena’s story is as inspirational as Mother is. Based on her true life story of first rehabilitating children from an orphanage in a sort of ghetto in Bulgaria (Well not as dire as those from Kibera), her work in theatre saw her travelling to Kenya, to turn the lives of orphans around using the same method she successfully implemented in Bulgaria.

And so what is the film all about? It is about a theatre director, who although she has managed to turn around the lives of orphans, she cannot do the same with her personal circumstances of failing to get children at the age of 32. Married, the husband eventually leaves her, when she leaves Bulgaria for Kenya where her heart is –turning the lives of orphans around.

But in the film, you can clearly see that both the husband and the wife love each other, but frustration that comes between them as a result of their different missions. Elena committed to use her theatre skills to heal the afflicted children in Kenya, and the husband on the other hand, wanting her to come back to Bulgaria, so that they can try again to seek help for her in order to conceive, this tension eventually breaks up their marriage. In other words, the gulf between their priorities in life is so huge that it cannot be mitigated. It is a tough situation because one can clearly see that the love spark is in fact still there between the wife and the husband, but they simply cannot be together anymore.

In the film though, we see the husband making a last ditch attempt to regain his wife by unannounced, travelling all the way to Kenya, where he sees the good work that Elena is doing with orphans. He is left speechless, and instead, decides that even though they can no longer realistically be together, he was going to assist her by looking for sponsorship for the work she is doing in Kenya. How sweet can it be?

At the screening, it was also interesting to witness the connection between Bulgaria and South Africa, as among the audience, there were South African who spoke Bulgarian. It turned out that these are people who went to school there. Some of course during the struggle for freedom as South Africans are known to have been hosted there as exiles.

The European Film Festival an annual event on the South African cultural calendar ended on October 22, 2023, having taken place in South Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho from October 12 to October 22, 2023 at select cinemas and streamed online.

From South Africa Mother will be travelling to Kibera where it will be screened at a film festival on November 2, where Sophia will present in person the award the film has won to the orphans where it was shot.

“’I am so excited to have the opportunity to present this award to them, especially because this place is so poor. Some parts of it so inaccessible by any sort of transport and so dangerous to the extent that during its shooting, we had to have people we guns to protect us,” she told me.