The Kenyan actress takes a childhood marriage at Nav

The 15-year-old star of a student for a student, forced to marry an older man, is evangelical to her role, despite the fact that her community in Northwestern Kenya can view him as a betrayal and treat her as expulsion.

“I want the movie to ignite conversations about this topic, because it's not really something people want to talk about,” Michelle Lemuia Ikeni tells the BBC.

She plays the 13-year-old Nava, the heroine of the coming movie, placed in Turkana County, a rural area that borders Uganda and where the UN says one in four girls are married before they turn 18.

“So many of my friends had to leave school or have never been to school because someone paid a dowry to marry them, so their fathers were married to them,” she says.

Michelle, who grew up in Turkana, where the film was shot, held these girls in mind when she depicted the emotions of Nava – a performance that won her the Africa Film Academy Award for the most promising actor last November.

Like all local children involved in the film, she has never acted before. When she registered for this, she thought she would just appear in a school drama.

“It changed my life, but I don't want to change my personality,” says the teenager.

In the movie, just after the 13-year-old Navi discovers that her exam results are in the county, she hears her father sells her to a rich man named Shank in exchange for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats.”

Instead of accepting his fate, Navy reduces the blood of his feet on his wedding night to falsify a period and then run to pursue his dream of going to high school in the capital, Nairobi.

Father and Shank are furious and try to follow her, but she manages to outsmart them with the help of her brother.

However, she goes home to Turkana to boldly stand up to them when she realizes that her new baby sister has been promised to make a wrapping bride.

There are many scenes that emphasize how widespread a childhood marriage is – and how it is accepted, even though it is against the law. According to the 2014 Kenya Marriage Act, one must be 18 years old to marry.

In one scene, when Navar's classmate does not appear until the end of the year exam, the boys in the class joke that he “is busy doing babies.”

The story is written by Milcah Cherotich, which won a writing contest, launched by the German-Lawmann NGOs that trains Lions Lions.

Cherotic says her own childhood was the inspiration for her first feature screenplay when she grew up.

Asked if the story is based on one person, it initially becomes too emotional to answer – but then continues to tell how her sister was forced to marry at the age of 14.

At 15, her sister was born, but the child became ill and died while wearing it on her back.

“She eventually lived a life that was not her. A life that was designed by my parents and her husband. These are things I wanted to change,” Cherotic told the BBC.

In Turkana it says in Turkana, she says.

But to her delight, she has already managed to change the perspective of a person when she looks at an early adaptation of Navi's video with her uncle – an unwavering supporter of childhood marriage.

“After about 55 minutes, his eyes were wet. So he was crying. And I was glad inside because I thought,” At least one man is touching now, “she says.

“I understood the importance of telling stories, the power it has.”

A childhood marriage is far from just a Kenyan question -the girls in Africa of Subsahara are at the highest risk of childhood marriage in the world, with one in three married before the age of 18, according to UN Unicef ​​Children's Agency.

As part of the goals for sustainable development of the UN, 2030 was set as a deadline for completely terminating the child's marriage, but UNICEF says that progress will have to be “significantly accelerated” in order to achieve this.

Distribution is decreasing worldwide – today one in five women aged 20 to 24 is marrying, as children for nearly one in four years ago 10 years ago.

The fastest progress has been made in South Asia, where the girl's risk of getting married in childhood has dropped by more than one third.

But a recent UNICEF report states that West and Central Africa, the region with the largest distribution of childhood marriage, has made little progress in the last 25 years. This tempo will need more 200 years on the region to eliminate the practice.

Toby Schmutzler, one of Navi's directors, says that everyone who worked on the movie was passionate about the project, but the challenge now is to see the movie.

“The message may be super beautiful, but if no one sees the movie, then no one hears the message,” he says.

The movie was shown at the UN Headquarters in New York last month – and Kenya chose it for his Oscars, although he didn't make it a short list last week.

Nevertheless, the director's team is heard to call for an international publication in the US, Canada, Europe, Central Africa and Australia.

The film was released in Kenya late last year, and in Nairobi he had one of the longest cinema runs that were once in a locally produced movie.

In Turkana, Apuu Mourin, one of the Kenyan directors of the film, organizes free Navi screenings at the Kakuma refugee camp.

She says the answer is largely positive, although the audience is made up mainly of young people, so the team plans to organize a truck to show the elders' movie in local villages and get their reactions.

On the spot, in a joint initiative to learn lions, a new school was built, where 300 girls have already been enrolled.

Schmutzler says this was welcomed by the Turkana community because the school is free to visit and also provides the girls with food in an area where there were a series of sushi that pushed many to the edge of hunger.

Michelle believes that if more people see the movie, he will have the potential to change life.

“When watching the movie, try to put yourself in Nawi's shoes, get in the shoes of all those 640 million girls,” she says.

“When you are young, you have so many dreams. I have so many dreams. When someone comes and takes it – this is the worst feeling ever.”