Wanuri Kahiu
“Pumzi” Director Wanuri Kahiu
Talks Female Lead Characters
& Telling *Our* Own Stories
A reminder that Focus Features’ Africa First short films are currently available to “watch instantly” on Netflix. So if you have a Netflix account, as I know a lot of you do, you really should check out this compilation of short films by up and coming African filmmakers - one of them being a sci-fi short titled Pumzi , from Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu.
But before you do (or even after) here’s a recent interview with Wanuri that was posted on YouTube today.
It’s about 13 minutes long, and worth listening to, as she talks about subjects that have come up frequently on this site - most recently, the presence of women (in this case black women) in unconventional lead roles on screen, and the fertile ground for stories that is Africa. It’s a good interview, though I could have done without the background music:
Blitz the Ambassador
Blitz the Ambassador
and film-making in Africa
Blitz the Ambassador, one of the most interesting Ghanaian artists on the scene today, talking about his twin passion, film-making, and the need for Africans to tell their own stories in film.
He's right; we do need to tell our own stories if we want to see fully-formed characters on our screens. As the Zimbabwean proverb has it: Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That said, it's not that we aren't telling our own stories on film. It's that, for financial and practical reasons very few films are being made for the cinema; the ones that are tend to come from the Francophone-African countries, and these are financed with French money. That, at least, has been the case since the 1980s. One place where lots of movies are made is Nigeria, whose movie industry, the second largest in the world in terms of the number of films produced, goes by the informal name Nollywood. Nollywood, however, specializes in film, rather than Cinema. This is not a bad thing; it works. As Producer/Director Mahmood Ali Balogun notes in the documentary This Is Nollywood, film-making in Nigeria works on a subsistence model: Shoot something that's likely to earn you your returns very quickly so you have money to eat and make the next one, and so on. And, with film-making being the financially-risky business that it is, you shoot cheaply, for as wide an audience as possible, and for mass distribution. Mass distribution in a country that has far fewer cinemas per head than anywhere in Europe or America means you shoot with DVD distribution in mind. Traditionally, a mass audience has meant stories and characters without too many shades of ambiguity. And shooting cheaply meant, and still means, you don't shoot on 35 mm film (still the most commonly used film gauge for cinema worldwide), you don't aim for art house aesthetics, and you shoot in regular homes, hotel rooms, offices and on the streets, with a small crew, and wrap up your shoot within a week or two.
Film actress Adaobi Enekwa playing a woman attacked by vigilantes on the set of a Nollywood movie production (©Tadej Znidarcic)
The Nollywood model is very successful because its operators understand the reality of the environment/market. But the objective is not Cinema, and this is what Blitz is referring to. We need Cinema, too. It'll come. With the shift from celluloid to digital, it's inevitable. As Nollywood Producer/Director Peace Piberesima says, "[Right now] we're doing films for the masses … at the moment it's not about quality; the quality is coming." In fact, it's already starting to come, and not only from Nigeria. Blitz mentioned Viva Riva by the Congolese writer/Director Djo Tunda Wa Munga, and Pumzi by and Kenyan Director Wanuri Kahiu (this won a Best Short Film award at the Cannes Independent Film Festival). Also keep an eye on Ugandan filmmaker Caroline Kamya, who shot the multi-award-winning Imani, actor/director Kunle Afolayan (Nigeria) whose shot The Figurine, Lonzo Nzekwe (Nigeria) who shot Anchor Baby (trailer below), and Newton Aduaka, whose film Ezra won the Grand Prize at Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival in 2007. All in good time.