Chiwetel Ejiofor's directorial debut and it's a strong start. Stuck in the fields, young William needs to find the courage to battle all the elements against him. Heavy rains followed by a dry season in a country which government does not provide enough for the lower classes of people, forcing him to work the fields so his family has enough to eat.

Being a bright young man and good with technology, he soon knows that he can find a solution for the drought and help his family. The battle between William's duties and ideas is well translated. Ejiofor is a strong player as his father, yet due to this performance it is him that kind of steals the screen.

It's not that the rest of the acting is bad, it's that one person stands above the rest, but it is unintentional. The photography is absolutely gorgeous and brands your eyes with the harsh thruth these people have to live with. Their goals are primal and the mistrust in technology to save them is warranted because having to build it takes away from the work needed to put in the field. The fact that they almost have to resort to praying for rain to survive is heartbraking enough.

In the end, it is a story about persevering in what you're good at and following an idea that can actually help and improve people's situations in a decor that we're not used to seeing in any other Hollywood movie. Props to Netflix and Ejiofor for picking up this story and putting it on the screen.

This is a great looking film depicting the abject poverty, despite their best efforts, of a subsistence farming community in Malawi. The cinematography is glorious as we follow the Kamkwamba family's struggles to educate their children and feed themselves at the same time - in the face of some pretty brutal government corruption and a severe drought. Son "William" (Maxwell Simba) is thirteen, and he has more than an average degree of nouse to him - he concludes, after studying a few engineering books in his school's library - that by cannibalising an old bike and an old ghetto-blaster, he can create a turbine mechanism that could be used to generate electrical power to pump water and help them to improve their harvest, and their lives... Chiwitel Ejiofor is his rather sceptical father, struggling under the pressures of keeping his family alive and the two have quite a forceful battle of wills as the young man attempts to convince his father that sacrificing the family's only mode of transport is a risk worth taking! I found the establishing parts of the story a bit too slow; once I understood the extent of their predicament and what the young man was trying to do, I was itching for him to succeed - and the behaviour of the father I found irritating and incongruous, slightly, with a man so keen on educating his family. That said, once it starts to focus on the project, I was astonished by the ingenuity of "William" and his young student friends as they materially change the lives of their famines for ever. It's a good film this - a try triumph of optimism over experience that I largely enjoyed watching.