Warriors

As one-sentence movie pitches go, ‘a tribe of Masai warriors raise awareness of women’s issues through the medium of cricket’ is something of a headspinner. But this documentary is as approachable as they come, telling the tale of Kenya’s amateur Cricket Warriors and their fight to combat female genital mutilation among traditional African communities. The film works best when it explores the impact of FGM: interviews with heartbreakingly young girls who’ve been mutilated and married off are truly disturbing.

But the film is also trying to be a rousing, celebratory sports story, as the Warriors jet off to London to take part in a cricket tournament. And this is less successful: a tour of the our city’s attractions in full tribal dress feels a bit stagey, and there’s a lingering sense that these young men from the colonies are being patronised by the British cricketing establishment, an Imperial throwback if ever there was one. Still, a meeting between the stuck-in-the-past village elders and the crusading cricketers unites the two strands nicely, and makes for an optimistic, if rather simplistic finale.