Kenyans’ award-winning film shorts set for Nairobi screening
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“I’d gone to Cinematic Solutions as an intern in my final year as an undergraduate in Communications from Daystar University. That is where I picked up most of my film making skills since the programme at Daystar, despite being about electronic media, was mostly journalistic, not cinematic,” he said.
The 95th edition of the Lola Kenya Screen Film Focus is happening this coming Monday evening at Goethe Institut where Hamba Productions will be presenting five short films.
According to Ian Kithinji, one of the co-founders of the Hamba group of Kenyan filmmakers, two of the five are award-winners with one of the two, entitled Indulge Me having won the 2015 Machakos Film Fest last July.
“Indulge Me earned us the first prize at Machakos Fest meaning we won Sh1 million,” said Kithinji who is both the screenwriter and director of the seven- minute film. “The competition was stiff,” said Abby Maina, another one of the 10 co-founders of Hamba.
“There were 90 film entries at Machakos, so we feel really good about bringing Indulge Me (plus four more short films) to Nairobi and to Goethe for the public to see.”
The other award-winning film that Hamba will screen on Monday night (from 5:30 to 8pm) is Rolex, a comedy co-directed by Kithinji together with Henry Mutisya.
The actual award-winner of that film was its star character, Elsaphan Njora playing the ‘Devil’ who gets conjured up when a woman (played by Tracy Mugo) wants to cast a spell on her spouse, but she doesn’t quite get what she wants. Njora won the Best Actor award at the 48 Hour Film Project in 2013.
“This was an international competition where filmmakers literally had 48 hours to write, cast, shoot, edit, and make the musical score for the film,” recalled Kithinji.
“On a Friday night in late November at around 7pm, we (and all the other participating filmmakers around the globe) were informed which genre we were to create our film in. It turned out to be comedy, which we had to complete and send in by the 7:30pm deadline the following Sunday night,” he added.
Noting that in a city like Paris, there were as many as 100 film submissions to the 48 Hours contest, Kithinji didn’t know the actual number of worldwide submissions, but it could have been in the thousands, not just the hundreds of film shorts sent that Sunday night November 22, 2013.
At the time it was Mizani Productions, not Hamba that produced Rolex. By then, Kithinji was still working freelance for Cinematic Solutions (CS), based in Lavington.
Film making skills
“I’d gone to Cinematic Solutions as an intern in my final year as an undergraduate in Communications from Daystar University. That is where I picked up most of my film making skills since the programme at Daystar, despite being about electronic media, was mostly journalistic, not cinematic,” he said.
It was the year after he’d co-directed Rolex that he left CS to start his own company. Short Cloud Entertainment which was established in 2014, the same year he got together with other filmmakers to form Hamba Productions. In addition to Indulge Me and Rolex, Hamba will screen three more original film shorts, including ‘Cliché’, “Are you Happy?” and ‘Happy Valentine.’ All three have interesting twists to them and all are very different.
For instance, Cliché is set in one fellow’s head as he imagines a relationship with the young woman of his dreams.
Are you happy? Is about a guy who’s in a relationship but who nonetheless sleeps around. The issue raised by the film is asking whether his cheating really makes him happy, or not? And Happy Valentine tells a story within a story, one being a satiric look at the soaps, the other being a real life story about a wife whose spouse is never around.
There will also be a Q & A with the filmmakers from Hamda.
The Lola Kenya Screen Film Focus is the creation of Ogova Ongedo who initially was regularly screening children’s cinema. But then he plugged into the burgeoning field of short Kenyan-made films where some of the most imaginative work in communications, electronic media and even scriptwriting is underway.
As for the Sh1million that the Indulge Me filmmakers won at Machakos Fest, the group which started off as just 10 became between 25 and 30 involved in the production process before the film was done.
“We ended up putting a big chunk of the money into a savings account for our future film work,” said Abby Maina who cited two TV pilots and one web series as a few of the projects that Hamba is currently working on.
