the camera, and hear the voice-over state:“My name is Thomas Munene. I am
years old.”
In festival programs and short film overviews, this film has been presented as
“A stills documentary. A normal day in an unusual life. Thomas () has lived
half his life as a street child in Nairobi. He has been adopted by a family living
in the slum.”This“stills documentary”,“still film”, or as I will suggest,“slide-
motion film”(in the broad sense I have already described) does not tell a story
about one, single day in Thomas’s life. Instead, it represents a typical day in the
boy’s life. After the credits, the film commences with a cock crowing at the
break of day and ends with the boy going to bed and turning off his light. In
between sunrise and sunset, Thomas has been our guide through his life, a re-
porter who presents his new family, takes us to his school on an average day,
brings us along on one of his Sunday trips to visit his old friends at the dump-
ster in Nairobi. The voice-over varies between past and present tense. In both
cases, the voice-over describes general situations rather than specific events,
about how his life used to be living on the street, and how it changed after a
family adopted him. There is no footage of his life on the street. Everything we
see is from the present. One gets the impression that the film crew simply fol-
lowed him for a day, except that the school visit and the trip to Nairobi prob-
ably happened on different days. Even when we see and hear Thomas interact-
ing with his classmates at school and with his friends at the dumpster, this
present day imagery and the voice-overs general presentation of what his days
looks like, what he likes and what he wishes for the future, creates a strong
experience of temporal presence. The title of the film,One Day, therefore im-
plies the future more than just a single day, a future of hope for his friends at
the dump and for himself, because he wants to become a journalist and also
hopes that he will eventually meet his biological family again (which is con-
firmed in the epilogue that he narrates four months later). Even if the voice-
over sometimes speaks in the past tense and most likely has been post-pro-
duced, the voice-over does not appear retrospective in this film. Thomas is look-
ing back on his life, contrasting his days now with how it used to be. But the
voice-over, the many illustrative images, the hope with which he describes his
situation, and the general comments and reporter’s style of Thomas’s voice-over
seems to work against the culturally formative figure of pastness connected to
photographic stills.
The color film may also be important in this respect. There is nothing about
color film as such that signals present tense. However, most slide-motion films
are black-and-white, and after the introduction of color film, choosing to shoot
in black-and-white film has certain connotations of“old time footage”,“docu-
mentary”or“art”. Without going into any details, these categories of black-
and-white photographic imagery often connote confirmation of what some-
98 Liv Hausken