In the spring of 2020, a teen-age Elsa Majimbo started posting the brutally honest, lo-fi videos that have made her a social-media celebrity. At the time, she had an audience of about ten thousand followers. She kept herself entertained during lockdown, at her family’s home in Nairobi, Kenya, laughing at her own jokes and filming herself—in closeup-selfie mode—on her rose-gold iPhone. Part of Majimbo’s charm is that she seems to enjoy her wickedly blunt musings as much as her online fans do. She débuted what is now one of her signature props: the potato chips, punctuating every single thought with a satisfyingly staccato crunch, a snack-food version of the comedy-club drummer’s punch-line rim shot. A few videos later, she introduced a pair of sunglasses à la Neo from “The Matrix.” Something about her riffs on style, work, isolation, and manners struck a chord, globally. She now has more than four million followers across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, has been featured on a digital cover of Teen Vogue, and was named a top creator by Forbes, in 2022.
The first time we fully see Majimbo in Julia Jansch’s film “Elsa,” she is looking directly into her iPhone camera and interrogating her audience: “Haven’t I seen you in that top before? Haven’t I seen you in that trouser before?” The video cuts to her letting out a jubilant howl and saying, “You have!” The viewer now realizes that these inquiries have been directed at Majimbo for being guilty of a perceived offense: wearing an outfit more than once. So what? In Majimbo’s words, “What’s your point?”
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Jansch, an award-winning filmmaker from South Africa, first saw Majimbo’s posts during the pandemic, when a friend sent her the comedian’s account on Instagram. “Obviously, she had me in hysterics,” Jansch said, “but, what’s more, it was like nothing I’d ever really seen before, [which] I think was the initial appeal.”
Jansch was captivated by Majimbo’s raw, natural style. “I’ve always been particularly fascinated in how people present themselves to the world and what they show and what they choose not to show,” she said. The comedian, who is also a former chess champion, was deliberately posting her unfiltered thoughts and image in a digital space where it’s becoming increasingly rare to encounter anything real or anything with which you can genuinely identify. “What’s quite amazing in her comedy,” Jansch said, “is that we find ourselves in all her jokes.”
After going viral, Majimbo moved to Los Angeles, in 2021, with a stop in New York to attend the Met Gala on behalf of Ray-Ban. Dressed in the brand’s Stories sunglasses and Valentino, she filmed the procession of celebrities and provided her biting commentary. When Jansch first spoke with Majimbo, it was clear that there was another side of the “Elsa” people think they know, and, while Jansch followed Majimbo around New York for the film, that more vulnerable side comes into full view. “She came out to me about how she’s had a lot of backlash from all these videos and how she’s had the cyberbullying and the hate speech,” Jansch said. “It was immediately apparent to me that that was where the deeper level of the story would come in.”
In the first part of the film, Majimbo is bubbly and confident: she walks to the chess tables in Washington Square Park to “whoop someone’s ass,” puts on a fashion show in a vintage-clothing store, and expresses over-the-top disappointment when no one notices how gorgeous she looks. But just like the queen in chess—the most powerful piece in the game—Majimbo, too, “can be taken down at any point.” When she recalls how her parents held a meeting to discuss her videos and how her older brother told her that she was embarrassing her whole family, Majimbo wavers. The memory still breaks her heart.
It is after moving through this darker, more private corner of Majimbo’s world that she finds her “divine self,” becomes aligned with her ori, and is vibrant once again. “I felt online I could fully be myself,” she says in the film, “ ’cause I was in my own space. It was just me. If people were coming, they were coming into my space. I wasn’t going into anyone’s space, so I never had to compromise for anyone.” To witness a twenty-one-year-old wielding such wisdom is arresting in itself; to see her defying the limitations of social media, which tend to flatten the lives and personalities of its users into one dimension, is thrilling.
