Africa seen through the lense of a young film-maker

The stories have been too local, and the craft still too raw.

It is at this point that Wanuri and other younger African voices come in.

Last week, she was at the Cannes International Film Festival screening Pumzi and just like the main character in this futuristic short, she was skin headed.

Forget her earlier hustler looks when she was still struggling to enter the world of Kenyan cinema.

While shooting Pumzi in South Africa, she cut her dreads for the bald look. But she is still chatty and ever smiling .

Several producers I met at Cannes had watched her earlier film From a Whisper that also screened at a certain corner at the festival and Wanuri was the glowing ambassador of Kenyan cinema at the event, a role she seemed to take with humility.

At Cannes, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I did finally manage to have a conversation with the twenty-something-year-old filmmaker.

This was several months after the initial date was fixed in Nairobi.

But don’t blame her. She has been strutting between festivals; one award winning occasion in Lagos to the next in Nairobi, Nigeria and latest in Cannes where the world cinema congregates once every year to celebrate the best of their own.

Wanuri comments on almost anything to do with cinema, and you can see that she has been thinking about African art, new voices of African cinema, storytelling as an art and globalisation that even art cannot ignore any more.

With her background in business management— her parents pushed her into a business school and she obliged for she did not want to look defiant—she has a few tips on how to tell stories that make commercial sense.

“I consider myself a storyteller using audio-visual media; I am a seer looking into the future on behalf of my people,” says Wanuri.

She warms up to the topic as the sea waves and ecstatic swimmers chasing each other on the beaches add to the carnival atmosphere.

“Just like music, film travels beyond the filmmaker, mine have been to places I will never be.”

In Pumzi, she peers into the future and tackles the likely environmental disasters that man is likely to face when all the waters are gone .