Nika Saravanja & Stephen Otieno Owino about JUMP OUT

“Doing a backflip is all about avoiding falling”

 

12-year-old Ian, his brother Marcus and their friend Promise are growing up in the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. They share the same playground and the same dream: to become acrobats, for which they exercise outdoors, in the open squares between the city’s blocks of houses. And they dream of travelling around the world, following in the footsteps of their older local heroes, who train them in performing their tricks and teach them a notion of both safety and showmanship. 

 

But besides accomplished acrobats, the boys have since become film stars, thanks to the documentary feature JUMP OUT. Director Nika Saravanja, together with the kids’ coach and mentor Stephen Otieno Owino, travelled to Brussels to present the film at the Filem’On festival.

 

Can you give me the bigger picture of where exactly we are?

Stephen Otieno Owino: In Nairobi, Kenya, a city very much divided by social class, with the super rich living in neighbourhoods that look like Beverly Hills, higher middle class living according to European standards, and the lower class living in suburbs. The differences between them are extreme. For every rich community, there is a slum where the workers live. Nairobi has a big international community, through the many NGOs based in Kenya, often operating in neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Sudan. Nairobi is densely populated, without any facilities for the poor neighbourhoods. So kids go into the fields to play football, basketball or do acrobatics. 

 

That’s the cradle of your acrobatic career?

Otieno Owino: That’s our background. Every year we put together a show with our acrobatic team training in the slums, and then we’re invited by European festivals to come and perform. With the money we take home from Europe, we set up training programmes for kids. By teaching them how to perform properly, we prevent them from breaking arms and legs. 

 

Which could easily happen! Those performances look pretty risky!

Otieno Owino: Physical danger is essential for acrobatics. Now that I’m a parent, I see the danger. But as a child, we watched movies on VHS that we tried to imitate on the streets, and then we fell and broke an arm and the next day we tried again – that was a part of growing up. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle, you need to fall and get up again. Based on our own experience, we now teach kids about the do’s and don’ts. As an acrobat, I tell them we do acrobatics to avoid the risks; doing a backflip is all about avoiding falling. But we’re not always around, and accidents seem to be unavoidable – they’re a part of life.  

 

We pick up a sense of that already in the opening scene.

Nika Saravanja: I wanted to start in the middle of the action with this uplifting energy that I always feel when watching their performances. It took a lot of time for the DoP Mark Modric and me to develop trust with the kids, which we did through games and playing with them. Basically we were there every day for months, just letting them show us their world, without us judging them. They were of course interested in the film equipment and wanted to touch everything, so we organised film workshops where they got simple film equipment and the knowledge of the film process.

Otieno Owino: Mark and Nika sometimes joined the exercises. These were no foreigners interfering with our business, these were acrobats; they were one of us. Such details made it much easier to mingle.

 

You have been in the circus too? 

Saravanja: No,I used to be an acrobat, but I was more into acro-yoga, and artistic acro-balance performances. We met this group of Kenyan acrobats in the Zagreb Street Festival; we thought these guys were crazy! That summer, we trained together in Croatia, became really good friends and basically extended family.

Otieno Owino: After we met in 2010, we often talked about the possibility of making a documentary together. On the spot in Kenya, we decided that the film should be about the kids in the programme. I contributed as co-director and helped with permits and logistics.

Saravanja: We simply couldn’t have made anything without him.

 

It’s like these kids are playing all the time, and then playing turns into training, and then training turns into some kind of career plan. 

Otieno Owino: When opportunity knocks, it can become a career, but it still feels like a hobby, a part of community life, partly determined by your background. I’ve seen kids that really wanted to become acrobats, but their parents said no.

 

What did your parents say?

Otieno Owino: My father wanted me to become a doctor, but now he is amazed by what I achieved.

Saravanja: When I came to Nairobi for the first time, I met 10-year-old kids that are nowadays acrobats performing with Steve in Europe. Or they left for a circus in China. And when they return, they train the little ones. It inspires children to see that it is possible to make it your profession. For some of them this is truly an ambition, others train their entire childhood and then stop to go to university and become an engineer.

 

In the images we get to see from your European performances, what surprised me were the costumes. You perform a stereotypical African archetype, wearing leopard skirts…

Otieno Owino: It’s not stereotyping; it’s a part of our widely spread cultural tradition. If you perform ballet, you wear a tutu. It’s not because clock shoes are a part of the Dutch international representation that people can’t wear them any longer. 

 

Ian introduces his big brother Marcus by saying that “we used to be close but now he doesn’t want to be with me anymore.” Then the rest of the story, you see them together…

Saravanja: This introduction was shot at the end of the filming process, when Marcus had already grown into a teenager. At first we focused on Marcus, while Ian was a shy kid in the background. Then Marcus suddenly grew a moustache and got two meters tall.

Otieno Owino: During training, I noticed how he tried to act more cool, especially with girls being around. That was a big transition. He used to be all the time with Ian and Promise, but then there are all those scenes in which Ian and Promise are alone, because Marcus is somewhere else, probably chasing girls. 

 

Although they were very good together, taking care of each other. 

Saravanja: Kids taking care of each other, that’s really a thing in Kenya. You can leave your two-year-old with a bunch of kids and you know they’ll take care of it.

Otieno Owino: It’s a community thing. When I grew up and my mother went to work, we could eat anywhere, together with others. For us, children, that was totally normal. It’s still like that in poor communities. Like Mary, one of the ladies that you see in the film… Her house is the first one at the gate of the community and it’s a gathering place. It’s like a train station. If you open the door, there are 20 kids sitting and watching television and you wouldn’t be able to tell which children are hers or not. When you ask her if she isn’t getting tired of this, Mary is like: no, I love people, I love kids! 

 

Ian and Marcus were living with their grandma?

Saravanja: Their mom was all the time at work in South Sudan while they grew up with grandma. Mum left when Ian was only six months old. When finally she returned, Ian was like… who is this woman? It took him some time to get adjusted to staying with his mum; his grandmother had been his role model and the only mother he knew until that point.

 

How did you deal with the situation of grandma’s death?

Saravanja: We tried to convince her to go to the hospital, but she was in this super religious church and didn’t want to have anything to do with Western medicine. In the end, we did take her to the hospital. One mother later, after we left Kenya, she passed away.

 

At the end of the film, we get a vague notion of how the kids’ dream is fulfilled.

Saravanja: I leave it to the audience’s imagination what exactly happened in Europe. Actually, the boys were mainly in awe about everyday things: flushing a toilet, light switches… cute, but not a real storyline. We save these European snippets, filmed with their own small cameras, for the end credits, so you can see how much fun they had. We would like to bring them to Europe again but the bureaucratic procedure is simply a nightmare. We’re in an exchange programme with European circus schools, but the process has always been difficult, and nowadays it’s getting even more complicated.

 

How did the kids react to the film?

Saravanja: Together with their families, they were the first to see the film, and it was very emotional for all of us. They also had a chance to see it on the big screen in the Under Our Skin Human Rights film festival in Nairobi, where they were the main stars in a full cinema; they came on stage and gave a great Q&A.

 

Gert Hermans