The New Yorker:

The half-hour documentary “Lazarus,” directed by David Darg and produced by Bryn Mooser, follows the Malawian musician Lazarus Chigwandali, who performs as Lazarus, on his rise from street busking to international recognition and activism—a process that the filmmakers and their friends helped instigate. Lazarus was born with albinism, which has been widely misunderstood, and stigmatized, in sub-Saharan East Africa. As a newborn, he says, he “would cry and cry” in the harsh sun with his parents as they worked the fields. “They named me Lazarus, the leper.” Life in East Africa for people with albinism can be dangerous. Ikponwosa Ero, the U.N. independent expert on albinism and human rights, who has albinism herself, says in the film, “There are beliefs that the body parts of persons with albinism can be used in witchcraft rituals and potions to achieve good luck, wealth, win elections.” Kidnapping and violence are fuelled by a lucrative black market; Lazarus tells a story about a near-miss of his own with a would-be trafficker. Lazarus, for whom busking was once a main source of income, aims to encourage understanding about people with albinism through his music, as does the film. Mooser told me, “If we can make Lazarus a star—and people start looking up to him, rather than looking down at him—that’ll be an incredible thing.”

Lazarus’s music is inviting and immediately appealing. As the film begins, we see him in his home town of Lilongwe. He sits on a portable bench, ties some jangling percussion instruments to his ankles, picks up his homemade canjo (a banjo made from a can, in this case incorporating a discarded oil can, a found-wood neck, hand-hewn tuning pegs, and strings made from salvaged bicycle-brake cable), and starts to sing and play, thwacking his bare heel against the bench. The music is warmly rousing, combining elements of traditional Malawian music, punk, and folk, with lyrics in Chichewa. Lazarus’s canjo produces a distinctive, sometimes dissonant, sound. Local kids surround him to listen.

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