Being recognised for taking the next right step is a genuine honour, says Kenyan filmmaker Waniru Kahiu

Being recognised for taking the next right step is a genuine honour, says Kenyan filmmaker Waniru Kahiu

Wanuri Kahiu does not have a personal copy of her 2018 film Rafiki, her best known work yet, and the first Kenyan film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The laws in her country prevent her from possessing, distributing or broadcasting her film in Kenya due to its LGBT content, she says in an interview to The Hindu. So, all of her copies are held by her producer who lives outside the country.

The Kenyan filmmaker, the recipient of the ‘Spirit of Cinema’ award at the 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), seems to take all of this in her stride. She does not consider even her act of suing Kenya’s censor board as courageous.

“If you are an accountant, and someone sits on your desk and prevents you from working, you push them off. That’s all I was trying to do, pushing away things that stood in the way of my film getting seen. I was not trying to be revolutionary or an anarchist. I felt like it was the next logical step. So being recognised for taking the next right step is such an honour. This award is a genuine honour especially when you are a small filmmaker and all you are trying to do is find the next work. I truly hope that it invigorates other filmmakers who come from communities that feel like they don’t have a voice,” says Kahiu.

As for Rafiki, which was much talked about at the IFFK that year too, she “wasn’t trying to make a political film, but just a queer love story”, based on a beautiful book that she loved.

Kahiu had grown up in Nairobi, which did not have much of a film industry to speak of, back then. Surprisingly, her staple diet on TV in her younger days included a lot of Indian films and television serials.

“We were growing up under a dictatorship. So many things were banned. The things that were allowed included the old Hollywood films and Indian films because they all were tame and very clean. I had never thought of making films until one day I went into a film studio owned by my mother’s friend. The idea that people make films for a living was extraordinary. So from the age of 16, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I just pursued it. Even when I did business studies for an undergraduate course, because my parents wanted to, I completely tailored it to film. I would take extra courses with no credits about film scripting and film theory,” she says.

‘Afrobubblegum’, a collective that she co-founded with the aim to correct common perceptions on Africa and create a new perspective on the continent, was set off by a question someone asked. After seeing Pumzi, her 2009 science fiction film, someone asked ‘Why are you making a science fiction film, when so many things are happening in Africa’.