Elizabeth Tadic, director. Umoja: No Men Allowed. 2010. 32 minutes. Australia/Kenya. Women Make Movies. $250.00.

Elizabeth Tadic, director. Umoja: No Men Allowed. 2010. 32 minutes. Australia/ Kenya. Women Make Movies. $250.00.Elizabeth Tadic's film about radical awakenings among women typically viewed as far from the feminist fold tells an engaging and at times humorous tale. It presents a community of Samburu women in Kenya who were individually cast out from their original villages after suffering rape by British soldiers. Alone and abandoned, cut off not only from their homes and husbands but also from their children, the women were mobilized by the film's key personality, Rebecca Lolosoli, to join forces and establish their own village. They name their village Umoja (Kiswahili for "Unity"), hold Lolosoli up as their "chief," and forbid entry to men.Lolosoli, who is also Samburu but not-as she is quick to point out-a rape victim herself, deploys her entrepreneurial spirit and education (signaled by excellent English) to coordinate the women. She confidently assumes authority in the telling of the tale and in the onscreen events, such as formally receiving a Samburu regional chief who attempts to reconcile the rebel women with their menfolk. His effort falls flat and the women all but throw him out of the village, with Lolosoli instructing him to tell the men to "leave these women alone." In other scenes, Lolosoli's networking skills are evidenced as she doles out clothing donated by a New York-based women's rights NGO, and she is praised by a female British tour operator who brings tourists to Umoja to purchase the women's beadwork and thereby support their independence. In watching the film, one cannot but admire the unity and strength these women develop after suffering rape, banishment, and separation from their children, and also Lolosoli for the clearly critical role she played in organizing them.Supportive though one may be of the feminist agenda suffusing the film, the heavy-handedness with which it is espoused is the film's undoing. Tadic falls prey to age-old stereotypes about African patriarchy, painting Samburu men in uniformly and exclusively negative strokes ("These men are just sleeping under the trees, from morning until evening, doing nothing," says Lolosoli) and including interviews with men who insult and threaten further violence against the women should they ever return, blaming them for getting raped in the first place. In pastoralist societies like Samburu and other Maa-speaking communities, a gendered division of labor exists in which certain tasks like water and firewood collection, cooking, child-rearing, milking the cattle, and house construction fall to women, while men herd and care for the livestock, including performing daily inspections, administering injections, treating for tick-born and other diseases, addressing broken bones and infections, and migrating great distances with them during the dry season. Thus the hard work associated with a pastoralist life is shared, not borne singularly by women. Nor are all or even most Maa-speaking men prone to violence-another resilient stereotype about pastoralists, who are often depicted in the media as spear-wielding aggressors of hapless neighbors. Through the Samburu chieFs pursuit of reconciliation, we see the presence of at least one man (an influential one at that, who presumably is not alone in his position) committed to communal peace over violence and who, significantly, seeks to reunite the women with their children.In uncritically casting all blame for these women's plight on their husbands and male kin, Tadic glosses over the true source of their misery: the British soldiers who raped them in the first place. Mentioning them only in passing and indicating that an investigation proved inconclusive, Tadic essentially absolves these men of guilt in her rush to judge Samburu men, the easy target. We are inundated with media misrepresentations of and feminist attacks on traditional societies and how they reputedly disempower Third World women, who consequently require gender uplift by enlightened First World sisters. …