Vincho Nchogu’s “One Woman, One Bra” is a Jumbled Drama about White Saviour Complex

Vincho Nchogu’s feature directorial debut, One Woman One Bra is screening at the 2026 Luanda International Film Festival as part of its International Competition category. Prior, the film had its world premiere  at the Venice Film Festival in 2025 as part of the Biennale College Cinema section before going on to win the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature at the BFI London Film Festival. At the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, it won the Audience Award and earned a Special Jury Mention for lead actress Sarah Karei. The film has also screened at Durban International Film Festival, Festival de Cine Africano de Tarifa (FCAT),  Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, and come November, it will be showing as part of the 2026 African International Film Festival(AFRIFF) lineup. The point being that Nchogu’s One Woman One Bra, the Kenyan-Nigerian film produced by Josh Olaoluwa, has been critically successful by industry standards. But, how successful is it as a work of art? That’s the crux of this review.  

Written and directed by Nchogu, the film absorbs anecdotal experiences of the writer-director in shaping the film’s narrative. Prior to film school, the director had a stint working for a nonprofit organization, making “propaganda films.” As she told Variety, African subjects would often “suppress their personal narratives to conform to the organization’s salvation myth. Then the question becomes: Are we telling the stories that we really want to tell, or is the funding dictating the stories we tell?” For African filmmakers, this is an all-too familiar headache. There are multitudes of stories to tell with scanty unconditional funding. Confronting this white saviour complex is one of the film’s interests. But, before getting there, the film, set in the picturesque rural village of Sayit, started as a portrait of Star (Sarah Karei), a 38-year-old unmarried woman with no knowledge of her parentage. The film opens to a community distributing title deeds for property. But, with no kin, a husband, and familial relations, Star must figure out how to claim her home and land, either by proving a family connection or raising enough funds. For a great moment, the film contends with belonging and identity for a woman within structured society. Through Star and her interactions with the village’s women, we learnt that identity and belonging, at least for a woman, rest on a strict patriarchal set up. 

The film maintains this great narrative momentum until it starts descending into seemingly connected but badly-tied-together subplots. Yes, she spotted a childhood photo of herself on the cover of a book and this prompted a desire to learn about her past. Narratively, this is a lazy way to motivate a 38-year-old woman to be curious about her past. Also, the NGO bit(which I have fragmentarily spoken about) introduced into the film seems unfounded, The foundation and progression of the story doesn’t accommodate them. When Star’s curiosity for her past monopolizes her attention, the film seems lost in the sea of jarring and jumbled-together stories. In one scene, Star’s identity as a woman is questioned due to her unmarried status, in another, she’s querying a woman about her parentage, in another, she’s discussing with a white woman about making brasserie available to women of the village. There’s a general disconnect that enveloped the film when it chased multiple interests. Nchogu, who wrote the script, must have been allured by the multiple independent stories and ideas she wants to address that she unceremoniously marry them together. That’s, perhaps, one way to explain how jumbled the writing and narrative is. 

It isn’t strange for a filmmaker to stage a film around a personal experience and layer multiple issues within it. Think Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War,  Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, Milisuthando Bongela’s Milisuthando, and others sponge off narrative of its filmmakers’ lived experiences. Also, Bong Joon Ho had famously said, “the most personal is the most creative” during his 2020 Oscar acceptance speech for Parasite. These films and the stories they tell aren’t strictly autobiographical but their uniqueness provide a map into navigating a cliche narrative. But, what’s strange is when the writing forgets to find a connective tissue amongst these multiple issues. The result is One Woman, One Bra: a dull but visually brilliant film about many and every thing.