When Wanuri Kahiu answers questions about her life as a filmmaker in Kenya, it seems perfectly fitting that she had been a bookworm before discovering cinema. Such is her way with words, the recollections of a 43-year-old woman so beautifully narrated. It annoys Wanuri when everything she does is identified as political only because of her gender and race. "This is just where I was born as a human being. If I were a white man, it would not be political. It would just be life," Wanuri says. Her laughter is catching.
She is at the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, receiving the Spirit of Cinema award in recognition of the work she has been doing. She does not think what she did was "courageous," she says, about suing the Kenyan government for banning her film on queer love, Rafiki. "I was just trying to push the things in the way of my film getting seen. I was not trying to be a revolutionary or an anarchist, just making the next right step. Being recognised for making the next right step is an honour. I hope it invigorates other filmmakers from communities that feel they don't have a voice and where self-censorship is happening. I hope it encourages filmmakers to know that their voices can never be silenced, that stories have their own life," she says in what could easily be an impromptu speech on a stage, but for Wanuri, it is just the way she speaks.
But you cannot peg Wanuri as a serious storyteller, nor will she let you. When she was travelling once and a journalist asked her what was so important about her film that she was going to show it in another country, Wanuri wondered why her film should be important. When they asked why she would take a science fiction film (Pumzi) with all that is happening in Africa, she wondered if imagination has a border. "Are people not allowed to feel or express joy through their work even though others are going through hardships?" she asks. The question led her to begin a movement called Afrobubblegum, which in one line, is a celebration of fun, fierce and frivolous African films and art from the African diaspora. It is a glorification of art for art's sake. Wanuri's movement picked up and spread across the continent. She watched joyfully as an Afrobubblegum festival sprang up in Kenya and people simply celebrated fun.
Wanuri names two films by other directors in Africa that would easily qualify as Afrobubblegum – the Senegalese film Banal & Adama, and the Moroccan movie The Mother of all Lies. Her latest film, Look Both Ways – a Hollywood project for Netflix – is a romantic comedy, playful and young, she says. At the moment, she is also working on multiple projects—a musical for Disney, a TV series called Washington Black for Hulu, an animation work with Sony and an independent film in Kenya. She lives in Kenya and works everywhere else, she says with that distinctive laugh of hers.
But growing up in Kenya, she did not have many filmmakers to look up to. What they got were videotapes of American shows and a lot of Indian television. "Those were the things allowed in the country, they were very clean. When I was growing up, there was a dictatorship, and so many books were banned. The first Kenyan filmmaker I remember from the 1990s is Wanjiru Kinyanjui, who made Battle of the Sacred Tree."
Watch: Trailer of Rafiki
Living in Nairobi, among a very small community of people, Wanuri had not thought of making films, But at the age of 16, when she visited a film studio of her mother's friend and realised that people made TV and films for a living, she knew this was what she wanted to do. She pursued it everywhere, applying for internships, taking courses in history of film studies and scriptwriting while being an undergraduate of business studies.
"I did not know what kind of films I wanted to make. I still don't. But in my films, the main character is always looking for belonging, searching for identity."
It took her 11 years of filmmaking to start making money from it, and that happened after Rafiki. Despite its ban in her country – and she's not even allowed to possess a copy – Rafiki brought her a lot of good fortune, “even an agent and manager in the US.” The bad part, Wanuri says, is that she is not necessarily making all the films she wanted to.
Read: IFFK 2023 has an eclectic list of anti-war films and cinema by women filmmakers