When Barack Obama won the U.S. election four years ago, his Kenyan half sister Auma was with her family at their homestead, watching the historic occasion on television.
It was a night Auma Obama remembers well. “We had a lot of people visiting to watch with us,” she says. “There was a lot of excitement because it had been such a tough race. There was a sense of relief that all the hard work had paid off.”
Alongside Auma and her family was filmmaker Branwen Okpako, who was making a documentary about Auma, “The Education of Auma Obama, ” which is being shown in London Tuesday to coincide with the U.S. election and as part of the Film Africa festival.
“I will never forget that period in their homestead,” says Okpako. “It was indescribable. Imagine something like that is happening to your family, yet so far away.”
Okpako, 43, a Nigerian-born filmmaker living in Germany, became friends with Auma when they were both film students in Berlin in the early 1990s.
“We were two of four African women studying at the film school at the time and we talked a lot about how the African continent was portrayed in film and how we wanted to change it,” says Okpako.
Auma shares a father — Barack Senior — with her younger half brother, Barack. The pair did not meet until after their father died in 1982 and Barack got in touch with Auma to explore his Kenyan roots…
Read more: CNN
