Fight Against Cancer Captured On Video

Kenya Wed 14-03-2007

Fight Against Cancer Captured On Video
By Emmanuel Mwendwa

Ignorance can be tragic. Ask Angelo Kinyua, until last week – a little known Kenyan freelance film maker and video journalist. He grabbed headlines globally in late June, after being declared CNN Multi-Choice African Journalist for the year 2005. Cancer a 16-minute documentary which he directed emerged tops from a field of 630 finalists.

The video captures an individual’s agonizing struggle, as he tenaciously hangs on to ebbing vestiges of his life and attempts to wage a spirited fight, albeit futile, against a chronic disease whose killer grip often tends to be overshadowed by HIV-Aids.

The production is a candid account, which unequivocally illustrates the perils of ignorance. It is a moving story of a disease borne bravely, while also laying bare its impact and devastating implications on both patient and family. “Cancer is a stealthily ailment, which if left untreated or unnoticed – it kills.

This precisely, is the message packaged and communicated: that if detected early, cancer is curable. Yet if ignored, silent growth of lumps is irreversible”, asserts Kinyua. But the shy Kinyua dedicates and attributes the video’s success to the late Simon Irungu Irungu seeks divine strengthMaina - a 33-year-old team builder and facilitator at Nairobi-based Dan Eldon Place of Tomorrow (DEPOT), who succumbed to cancer last year.

“He wanted to share his personal experience and help create awareness by shedding light on a common tendency to ignore symptoms of a disease which assaults the human body stealthily”, he observes.

Kinyua spent five months with Irungu, who became a friend and mentor – as he was nursed through cancer’s terminal stages. “I followed him to his last days. The tough part was the knowledge he would not live for long. But he faced every new day with optimism.

He was easy-going, open-minded and endowed with a strong will and character”, Kinyua recalls. Irungu lived with cancer for 11 years, long after his elder brother also succumbed to the disease. When diagnosed in 1992 at Kenyatta National Hospital, East Africa’s biggest referral centre, he was among an estimated 10,000 new cancer infection cases reported every year in Kenya.

Production wrapped up last year but the video was ignored. By end of 2004, it elicited sporadic screenings on local television courtesy of Tazama series a popular local TV series. None of Kenya’s half dozen mainstream TV channels, apart from Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) accorded the clip airtime.

During its maiden appearance at last year’s annual Kenya Cineweek, Cancer scooped the best documentary award but Kinyua was discouraged by the lukewarm reception elsewhere, and when the CNN event organizers sent 2005 entry forms, he almost ignored them.

“In 2003, I submitted a 6-minute documentary feature title Mombasa Mwambao – shot at the Kenyan coast retracing life and times of a veteran local TV actor abandoned by his family. I was not lucky then but they kept my contacts”, he explains. His enthusiasm has been dampened gradually on basis of the state of local film industry – wherein new ‘players’ are ignored.

The Kenyan government has also been reluctant to put in place, structures or policies to nurture growth of visual media. Consequently, Kinyua’s efforts, talent and those of his peers were still unrecognized – until he submitted Cancer albeit reluctantly for this year’s event.Award winner (left) with colleagues

“I did not expect to win overall award, but I knew Cancer was a powerful story, very emotional. Many who view it react with sadness, some even cry. I met a woman who said she was touched and gravely affected”, he says. The plot, camerawork and script’s flow is equally detailed, illustrative and informative – key factors that also caught the CNN event panelists and judges’ attention.

Their citation concisely spells out their thoughts: "This is a powerful piece where a journalist looks at disease that has started spreading right across Africa. Not HIV and Aids but cancer. The journalist showed courage in facing up to a rather difficult topic. He obviously won the confidence of the patient and the family involved.

But he went over and above that, staying with the story and treating it with the kind of sensitivity it needed, to help viewers understand the issues involved, and feel educated at the end of it. That's what medical journalism is about."

Posted By: African Colours

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