The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)

Chiwetel Ejiofor directs and stars in this 2019 adaptation of William Kamkwamba's memoir, a film about a Malawian boy who builds a windmill out of junkyard scrap and a dismantled bicycle. It is earnest, well-acted, and entirely sincere. It is also, from a classification standpoint, a barren field. The camera lingers on hunger and dust and a family tearing itself apart over a single sack of grain. Nothing in the frame is arranged to instruct us on how to live.

The cast is Malawian because the story is Malawian, not because a casting director was working through a checklist. Women in the film carry water, bury dogs, and urge husbands toward reason, which is what women in these circumstances would do. Race enters only as geography. The drought is weather, not a sermon on carbon emissions. There is no villainous corporation, no lecture on equity, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain the correct position on anything. The film's politics are the politics of a village trying to eat.

We are left, then, with a film that scores nothing on any ledger we maintain. It is a true story told without revision, an inspirational arc delivered without a single note of preaching. There is a certain melancholy in this. After years of cataloguing, we find a work of genuine moral seriousness that declines to be sorted into any of our bins. Ejiofor's restraint is admirable and, for our purposes, useless. The windmill turns. The crops grow. The spreadsheet stays empty.