When international audiences think of films set in Kenya, they think of scenes of poverty, unpaved roads, corruption and revolution. You don’t think sci-fi. Which is why female director Wanuri Kahiu’s latest film, a short that premiered at Sundance last month, made such a splash. It’s the country’s first sci-fi film ever to hit the festival, which sounds like a ridiculously slim record to win — but it’s one that’s culturally so important.
While often, Western film crews dash over to Kenya to make those films that look like the ones you expect, there’s not really a system for local filmmakers to make and distribute to an international audience. The success (read: $$$) of the South Africa-originated District 9 might have changed all of that. Focus Features launched an Africa First short film program and foreign audiences may be warming up to the fact that the vast continent has more than one story to tell.
That’s certainly what Kahiu and her backers hope. Pumzi (which means 'breath' in Kiswahili) is a film that could have been made nowhere other than Kenya, yet which tells a universal story. It takes place 35 years after World War III, which we’re told took place as a fight over fresh water, in a community of Kenyans who have hunkered down to live below Earth’s dead surface. The story is told through the eyes of the protagonist, Asha [South African actor Kudzani Moswela], who is living in an enclosed underground community. The camera follows the Wall-E-inspired tale of an East African government employee who, when she finds a living soil sample, is determined to go up to the surface to find more.
While it might seem like Pumzi is a departure from Kahiu’s last film, the feature length From a Whisper — a thriller based on the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam (which snagged five African Academy Movie Awards) — it’s also political. As Wired noted, “Like recent standouts District 9 and Sleep Dealer, the short film taps into Third World realities and spins them forward for dramatic effect.”
In this case — a lack of water and fresh air, very real threats that could devolve into something like what Pumzi captures.
Film director Wanuri Kahiu is indeed visionary, as well as consciousness-raising, adding to her growing track record of her use of the power of film as a tool to express important topical issues in a manner that ignites reflection and hopefully spurs action.
Kahiu on Moswela
"She breathed into the film unimaginable softness and courage. She became the heart of my heart. Her interpretation of Asha and the story was painfully tender and through it new, undiscovered layers of the film came alive."
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One thing I really love about Nairobi is that it is a place of possibilities. The excitement that this generation is creating and defining concepts, spaces and moments in our young history is palpable. A moment like this, a first, where a dream becomes a reality, paves the way for other dreamers, in that it feeds them the courage to continue dreaming. For we would be stagnant and stale without our dreamers.
(original article: sci-culturist)
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