Site designed by:
Martha-Marie Kleinhans
Last modified:
15 September 2005
This half-hour film is the intriguing story of the adventures of Africa’s most prevalent footwear: Flip-Flops. Filmed in the Lamu Archipelago of Kenya over a period of two years it is ‘a beautiful and uplifting film’, ‘an ingenious look at the life-cycle of flip-flops…’ From the factory floors of Mombasa, this colorful footwear transports us to the ancient, yet vibrant Swahili island of Lamu. Cheap and cheerful, the flip-flops are everywhere; aboard dhows and donkeys, bearing loads and left dormant on doormats. Worn-in, worn-out, and finally discarded at the mercy of the Indian Ocean, their story moves slickly on. Buoyant and resilient, the Flip-Flotsam is sea-borne for years, colonized by barnacles and boarded by swimming crabs, eventually coming ashore on distant coastlines. On a wild island beach, in the far north of Kenya, the weathered old soles are gathered by beach-combing islanders, who in the shade of their thatched homes carve life back into the tide’s offerings. Soon crabs appear, fish, dolphins and turtles too, all in bright new flip-flop colors. Assembling them as mobiles, the villagers set sail with their creations, to sell them back along the shop-lined shores from where the Flip-Flotsam came.
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