Movies about Windmill
When I was 14, I was sulking in malls and reading Harry Potter. When William Kamkwamba was 14, he was constructing the 36-foot windmill in a remote village in Northern Malawi that would eventually bring electric power to his family, and make life possible during a famine. William’s makeshift wind turbine brought lights to their home and a water pump that irrigated their tobacco fields.
S Chlapec, který využil vítr, out on Netflix on March 1, Kamkwamba’s incredible life achievement gets a soaring cinematic treatment. The film was written and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor; he also stars as William’s skeptical-turned-supportive father, Trywell Kamkwamba. An adorable and charismatic Maxwell Simba plays William, the second of Trywell and Agnes Kamkwamba’s seven children, and only son.
Ironically, Kamkwamba’s story of tremendous engineering achievement begins with him being kicked out of school. Kamkwamba’s parents were unable to pay his $80 annual tuition fee a remain afloat during the deadly Malawi famine of 2002, during which several hundred Malawians died of hunger. No longer bound to the classroom, Kamkwamba stole away from his family’s maize and tobacco fields for time in his town’s library. There, he checked out the English-language textbook, Použití energie, emblazoned with a windmill on the cover.
Kamkwamba knew what he wanted to do: Bring electricity and water to his village. But without money for fuel, Kamkwamba didn’t immediately know how to achieve this near-impossible dream — only 1% of Malawi’s rural population has access to electricity. Despite his shaky grasp of English at the time, Kamkwamba pieced together the information in the wind power textbook and set off recreating the cover’s image as best he could.
Photo: Rich Fury/Getty Images.
While his friends were in class, Kamkwamba scavenged for windmill materials from the scrap yard near his former school. To his neighbors watching outside, Kamkwamba appeared to be unhinged — they called him «misala,» or crazy.
“When I was making [the windmill], all these people were mocking me that I was driving mad, but I had confidence in what I was doing because I knew if it was written in the books then it was true and possible. When I succeeded they were impressed,” Kamkwamba explained to the Malawi Daily Times v 2006.
In the movie, even Kamkwamba’s father struggles to wrap his mind around the concepts that come so naturally to his son. Despite facing skepticism, Kamkwamba ended up constructing a windmill using scrap metal, PVC pip, and tractor and bicycle parts. Kamkwamba’s first windmill was able to power four lights, an achievement on its own.
But it’s the second windmill that still towers today in the village of Wimbe, a testament to one boy’s ingeniousness and can-do spirit. In addition to providing electricity, this tall windmill powered a deep well that freed Wimbe’s farmers from relying entirely on the weather.
«With a windmill, I could stay awake at night reading instead of going to bed at 7 with the rest of Malawi,» Kamkwamba wrote in his 2009 book, Chlapec, který využil vítr. «With a windmill, we’d finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger. A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom.»
In 2006, four years after it went up, Kamkwamba’s makeshift windmill attracted the attention of local journalists. A feature story in the Malawi Daily Times proclaimed, «School Dropout With a Streak of Genius.» After this accomplishment, Kamkwamba still hadn’t been able to return to school. But thanks increased media coverage, a government official arranged for Kamkwamba’s education to be paid for through high school. In 2007, Kamkwamba’s story reached a global scale. He was the the star of a TED conference hosted in Arusha, Tanzania. There, Kamkwamba met Ted Rielly, the New York-based TED community director who helped him through college.
Kamkwamba’s achievements have carried him away from his 60-family home village of Wimbe. His 2009 book Chlapec, který využil vítr spent weeks on best-seller list and became mandatory reading for incoming freshmen at the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. In 2014, he graduated from Dartmouth University. By the time he was 31, he had a motion picture and a documentary made about him. And, of course, he made Time Magazine’s «30 Under 30″ List.
But no matter how far he traveled, Kamkwamba’s goal was always to return to Malawi and better his community. Even while he was in college in New Hampshire, Kamkwamba’s mind was on Malawi. As a 24-year-old engineering student, Kamkwamba was paying for the private school of four sisters, a cousin, a friend, and some neighbors out of pocket. He also founded a soccer team and launched a fundraiser to rebuild the local school. «What I am always thinking about is how I can apply what I am learning here to help those at home,” Kamkwamba told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2011, when he was a freshman.
Kamkwamba lived up to his promise. It should come as no surprise to hear that Kamkwamba has continued his philanthropic goals. His nonprofit, Moving Windmills, is devoted to pursuing educational and developmental projects in Malawi.
Chlapec, který využil vítr
“The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind” tells the true story of William Kamkwamba; the young Malawian genius who built a windmill entirely via DIY methods in the early 2000s, to save his family and village from drought and famine. World-premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival earlier this evening, the Oscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s skilled directorial debut is as inspiring and morally upright as you’d expect from a film with such rousing source material drawn from real life. While thoroughly traditional with familiar beats of an exceptional child, his disapproving father and an eventual resolution that unites generations, Ejiofor’s movie eloquently harnesses all these customary elements and yields them into an irresistible family film that plays like a brand-new “October Sky” with an urgent human-interest dimension at its heart.
While good natured and comfortingly conventional, “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind,” adapted from Kamkwamba’s autobiography by Ejiofor, is far from a forgettable, paint-by-numbers child prodigy film. This is thanks in large part to Ejiofor’s loving attention to the region’s cultural and geographic specificities and refusal of downplaying the hardships that slowly and fatally fatigue Kamkwamba’s village in Wimbe; qualities that also elevated Mira Nair’s accomplished and similarly-themed “Queen of Katwe”. More than anything, Ejiofor treats his film not as a fairy tale, but as a life-or-death survival story. He sees the mostly self-taught teen William (Maxwell Simba, in an impressive breakthrough performance) on equal footing with the hard-bitten heroes of sea and space adventures, equipped only with smarts and a will to rise above the hostile conditions that surround him. Through the sun-baked, dust-covered colors of the territory vividly shot by Dick Pope, “The Wind” sympathetically traces and builds William as he tackles the endless string of problems in front of him one at a time.
We first meet William in 2001 as a curious-minded schoolboy with a love of electronics. He fixes town folk’s broken radios to help out his family financially and spends much time in the village junkyard, collecting parts to build batteries and other necessary devices. When unreliable weather and a land dispute threaten the crops and the longevity of their family farm, the Kamkwambas fall short of the funds to support William’s education at a local school. But the now dismissed, ever-ambitious William, with a cheeky threat to expose his sister Annie’s (Lily Banda) secret love affair with the school tutor Mr. Kachigunda’s (Lemogang Tsipa), cuts a deal with his teacher to use the school’s basic library in his own time. There, he meets the 8th grade American textbook Použití energie that would change the course of his and his town’s life.
Throughout “The Wind,” Ejiofor paints a multifaceted portrait of William’s world. Inside his home, we observe what he sees and hears through doorways and windows—commonplace familial disagreements and one-upmanship between relatives, fretful financial discussions, the aforementioned forbidden affair, a loyal dog that would follow him to death, and so on. Outside, Ejiofor attentively places the Kamkwamba Farm into social and political context without ever abandoning our young hero. The corruption amid unsympathetic, power-hungry figures come into sharp focus during a political rally that quickly turns bloody. And then the draught begins, ruthless looters loom around and a grave case of famine takes over William’s village—the heartbreaking aftermath of which Ejiofor doesn’t sugar-coat. In the midst of this grim crisis sketched in detail, we desperately root for William’s success to convince his stubborn father to give up his bike, the parts of which could be used in his windmill project. “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind” is one of those true-story films that genuinely earns the inevitable, climactic triumph in its finale. Some might call it predictable, but William—who in real-life worked on numerous subsequent sustainable energy projects and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2014—leaves an undeniably powerful impression in the end, standing tall and proud on something amazing that he built. Something our kids can and should look up to.
This review was filed from the Sundance Film Festival on January 26th.
The Windmill Movie
The life of experimental filmmaker and Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers is chronicled in this innovative documentary, constructed by his former student Alexander Olch from footage shot by Rogers for a long-planned autobiography.
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The Windmill Movie
2:21 The Windmill Movie