From Kenya with Love and Fear

“HEARTS DO NOT MEET LIKE ROADS,” goes a Kenyan saying. It could describe the roundabout backstory of Softie, a portrait of photojournalist and activist Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, who ran for Kenyan parliament on an anti-corruption platform in 2017, risking both his own safety and that of his wife and three young children.

Though it’s set in the bustling streets of Nairobi, , named for the diminutive Mwangi’s childhood nickname, is a film with an international provenance. Director Sam Soko conceived of the film in an activist artist co-op in Nairobi and it gestated through Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival’s funding programs before being midwifed by Montreal’s EyeSteelFilms. At the film’s world premiere at Sundance, Soko and his Canadian collaborators Mila Aung-Thwin and Ryan Mullins won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award landed broadcast slots on the two most prominent English-language documentary series in the world, PBS’s POV and the BBC’s Storyville. was also selected as the first African film to open Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival, which is postponed due to COVID-19. “It may be uncool to say this,” says Soko, talking on Facetime from his Nairobi home, “but Hot Docs opened all the doors, so getting into Hot Docs was more important than Sundance.”