Netflix, the world’s leading Internet entertainment service is on March 1, 2019 set to release a movie titled ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,’ based on a true story of a 32-year-old Malawian, William Kamkwamba.
At the age of 13, Kamkwamba built a wind turbine to power a few electrical appliances in his family’s house in Wimbe, Kasungu using blue gum trees, bicycle parts and materials collected from an indigenous scrapyard.
The movie has been inspired by a book, ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ authored by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer published by Harper Collins Publishers in 2007.
Hollywood Daily online magazine, last week reported that ‘12 Years a Slave’ star, Chiwetel Ejiofor directed the movie.
Ejiofor said he was enthused by the book and wanted get the entire sense of it.
“To get emotional truth of the story, I spent a lot of time with William.
“I came to Malawi to experience the book from the actual ground. I met his family, friends and saw the village where everything took place.
“William, his family and people live these incredibly epic lives and that was something that I really found in the book. It’s an epic story,” said Ejiofor in quotes reported by the online magazine.
Kamkwamba told the magazine that he did not even dream of being a hero of some sort or that his story could be told in a movie.
“It’s very exciting to me because at the time that I was writing the book I wanted to reach out to as many people as possible. Having this chance of getting this story into a movie is going to reach more people than the book could have managed to do,” he explained.
Kamkwamba added that, “A movie with Netflix, an internet service provider with over a million subscribers worldwide will enable a lot of people to access the story and learn from it.”
Participant Media, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Films and British Film Institute (BFI) with funds from the National Lottery, are lead financiers on the movie project, along with Head Gear, Econet and LipSync.
Potboiler Productions’ Andrea Calderwood and Gail Egan have produced the film.
