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Culture Watch: How To Live

A celebration of joy and resilience of queer communities in Nairobi.

Gaydar

30 Mar 2025 — 2 min read

This documentary from Njoroge Muthoni immerses us in the queer communities of Nairobi.

How To Live is Muthoni's debut feature, and there's a lot of ideas and juxtaposition of styles and techniques.

The core of the film is observational footage of the ballroom and drag scene in Nairobi, interspersed with vox pop interviews. Themes being explored are what it means to live, how we experience joy, masculinity, and the dreams and aspirations of queer people.

There is a deliberate roughness and rawness to the way these stories are presented - capturing the energy of the events and the people. However the enthusiastic use of hand-held camera makes many sequences difficult to watch and a tighter edit might have helped bring a bit more shape and structure to the project.

Muthoni draws overt parallels to the film Paris Is Burning, and has clearly created How To Live as part of that genre. However we don't quite the depth of storytelling or the emotional connection that Jennie Livingston was able to draw out of her subjects.

We also don't get much of the wider context within which these queer communities in Nairobi are existing. At one point, a house party is raided by police. While we're told that the party was targeted because it was a queer party, we don't get much of a sense of the impact of that kind of state-sanctioned persecution.

There's also an interesting conversation about how queer identity in Africa is shaped by queer narratives imported from the US and western culture. It might have been interesting to dig a bit deeper into that.

Overall, this is a welcome opportunity to experience queer joy in Nairobi and showcase queer communities that we don't get to hear much about in the global context.

How To Live is featured as part of the BFI Flare film festival in London