Africa seen through the lense of a young film-maker

Every time you watch clips of Wanuri Kahiu’s films, it is as if she is recreating her world. 

Not that she has a problem with her looks or even identity.

But judging by what she says — and even how she says it — she hopes to sell the contemporary African story.  

And she is going places. We met at the Cannes festival and the Kenyan filmmaker, trained around the world, was still hard at her work.

Besides the screenings, the Mombasa-based film maker has won several accolades. 

Just last week, she clinched another one from Cannes (pronounced as Kan).

Her sci-fiction was declared the best short film at the Cannes Independent Film Festival.

The festival runs alongside Festival de Cannes but is an independent occasion to celebrate indigenous film-makers.

Wanuri’s win signals a new direction for Kenyan cinema: one that speaks the international cinema language but still speaks to Kenyans.

Cultural films

In the last decade, African cinema has suffered several blows, especially to do with financing.

The French, who used to throw some cash this way have put their money in EU pockets and the little that is left is spread a little too thin.

Even Anglophone African now benefits.

High end cultural films subsequently disappeared and the few that saw the light were too few and went unnoticed.

With Nigeria’s Nollywood and such experiments across the continent, Africa has churned out thousands of films that have appeal on the continent, but not necessarily in other parts of the world.

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 .

During a pause in our conversation, she picks up a bottle of water.”: “Why use so much water to bottle just half or a quarter litre?” she poses.

And this is how her film Pumzi came about.

She spent time with an equally quizzical colleague together with whom they tried to construct the world, several years from today.

The mini-skirt must have disappeared from this world to leave a bare body.

All the water was gone, life was on the verge of extinction. But there was hope and that is what seems to endear her and her work to many.

It shows hope even where hopelessness seems to permeate every space.

“I tell stories of the Africa I know, not what they have prescribed,” says a philosophical Wanuri. She is not very patience with ghetto filmmakers in Africa who live off other people’s misery.

“I would rather tell the story of the Africa that I know well—a knowledgeable continent that is ready to fly.”

This sounds a romanticised concept, but not to Wanuri.

The topic interests her, and it seems like she can go on and on.

She thinks that African storytellers must be conscious of what they spew out and should generate interesting discourses, not make bland statements that cannot arouse interest in their works.