Wanuri Kahiu

Her first feature film, From a Whisper (2008), received a total of 12 nominations and earned five awards at the 5th Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2009.[5] The film fictionalizes the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. It tells the story of a young girl, Tamani, who loses her mother in the attack and is told by her father that her mother is missing when she is actually deceased. Tamani searches for her mother, painting hearts across the city, she also befriends a policeman named Abu. Abu helps Tamani as the viewers discover the shame he feels for not stopping his friend who helped attack the embassy. Film scholar, Clara Giruzzi highlights Kahiu's display of an African feminist sensibility, displayed by the egalitarian relationships in the film, and the pacifist messages in the wake of national trauma, which challenge essentialist and universalist western perspectives of Africa.[6]

Dennis Harvey, for the Daily Variety, writes that despite the film's occasional "titled" writing and performances, the drama "effectively puts the causes and aftermath of large terrorist actions in personal terms."[7]

According to literature scholar Mich Nyawalo, Pumzi (2009) challenges the pessimistic representation of African realities and futures by using the aesthetics of Afrofutirism to demonstrate African-led creativity. It depicts the story of a young botanist Asha, thirty five years after World War III (aka the water war).[8] Asha discovers life outside of her post-apocalyptic underground community. In her protectionist community, members must take dream suppressants to quiet hopes of a better future.[8] Mitch Nyawalo argues that Pumzi's destruction parallels the economic devastation in the aftermath of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs. The film also displays an "ecofemninst critical posture" where women are most affected by environment devastation but also are at the forefront of bettering their societies.[9]

Art scholar Omar Kholeif writes about Pumzi's interpellation of Western understandings of Africa: "Kahiu's film poses a poignant allegory in that it espouses an indirect commentary on imperial essentialism of the superficial Other. This is achieved by correlating the disenchantment that gave rise to science fiction with the perceived notions of Africa as a barren and impoverished social and geographic entity."[10]

African Studies scholar MaryEllen Higgins describes the film's "untraceable sound" suggesting "motion...without any visually perceivable movement" that "breaks the quiet stillness of a devastated, dead landscape".[8] The sound, Higgins writes, is "strange" like an "approaching storm".[8]

Kahiu's documentary For Our Land documents Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Wangari Maathai's story. Maathai's filmed biography takes part of a series "The Great Africans" for a South African television channel (M-Net).[11] The documentary gives voice to the professor's environmental and political activism.[11] Although film critic, Kathryn Mara, criticizes some of the "unexplained chronological gaps", she notes that the film does present the professor's legacy "in a lively and engaged manner".[11] The documentary underscores the "relationship between European colonialism and environmental change" as well as the "intersectionalities" of battling over land with housing developments.[11]

Kahiu's 2018 film Rafiki ("Friend") received funding by the Netherlands Film Fund. The production company is Big World Cinema, a South African company supporting young African filmmakers. The production team came from Kenya, France, and the Netherlands. Rafiki chronicles the story of two Kenyan girls who fall in love with each other and struggle to navigate this love with their families in a homophobic society. In an interview with Olivier Barlet, Kahiu says that she chose to adapt Ugandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko's short story "Jambula Tree", due to its "texture and nuances" in the taboo love story. Homosexuality in Africa has long been debated, but Kahiu tells Olivier Barlet that homophobia is not of the spirit of Ubuntu since it marginalizes people in the community. Above all, Kahiu finished her interview with Olivier Barlet by saying that she hopes the upcoming film will portray a "normal love story" that acknowledges the heroic challenges of choosing a "difficult love".[12] In addition, Kahiu discusses in an NPR interview with Sacha Pfeiffer how her films are not necessarily meant to be political, how she does not create them for that purpose, but they are "deemed political" because of her race and gender. She goes on to lament how unfortunate it is "that sometimes that when two people are in love, the moment that you change the gender and the race of the people in love, it becomes increasingly political" and that is all audiences and critics tend to see.[13] The film was selected to premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, and was the first Kenyan film to screen at the festival where it received a standing ovation,[14] but was banned in Kahiu's home country of Kenya due to its controversial themes.[15] It was shown at the 2018 London Film Festival.[16]

The Wooden Camel is Kahiu's first children's book. It tells the story of a boy, named Etabo, who dreams of racing camels. His older siblings tease him and his family sells their camels to survive. With the help of his goat friend and his spirits, who tell him his "dreams are enough", he continues to daydream. His sister then carves him a wooden camel, bringing Etabo closer to his family.[17]

Kahiu's co-written short story, "RUSTIES", indulges a futuristic world. The story tells the story of the relationship between a young girl and a traffic-directing robots. In an interview with Quartz, Kahiu says that creating images for African children is important to correct "being written out of our histories" and to hope for a future Africa.[18]

In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named her one of the Pride50 "trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people".[19]

In April 2019, Wanuri Kahiu and hollywood star Milly Brown teamed up for a film adaptation of the YA novel The Thing About Jellyfish for Universal Studios.[20] Wanuri Kahiu is set to direct the film, which will be produced by producers Gigi Pritzker and Rachel Shane of MWM Studios, Bruna Papandrea, and Reese Witherspoon.

The Thing About Jellyfish, written by Ali Benjamin is a stunning debut novel about grief and wonder that was an instant New York Times bestseller.[21]

Wanuri Kahiu is also among writers who will be working on the adaptation of Octavia Butler novel, Wild Seed into a film, in a project by Amazon.[22]

Wanuri, who will also be director of the Wild Seed film, will develop the script alongside Nigeria’s author Nnedi Okorafor. The show will come to Amazon courtesy of Viola Davis and Julius Tennon of JuVee Production.[23]

Kahiu engages with Afrofuturism, both in her artistic creation and as inspiration. Drawing on the depth, power, and histories of African mythologies, spiritualities, and naturalisms, Kahiu has made the argument that African peoples and cultures have been engaging in afrofuturistic thought for centuries, if not longer.[18] Primarily, she locates Africa as relatively close to the spirit world, allowing for a blending of spirituality and reality both in story and in lived reality. She positions Africa as an inherently futuristic space, one that disrupts and does away with Western binaries surrounding technology, nature, and linear time. Africa's futurity is one far older, deeper, and richer than anything that the West has come up with. Contemporarily, Kahiu has identified an African Afrofuturism as one that undergoes a postcolonial reclamation of its own timelines, narratives, and spaces. This becomes apparent in Pumzi, in which reclamation and reuse are shown to be authentically, inherently African practices.[6] Pumzi's celebration of an Afro-centric future criticizes Afro-pessimism. In Pumzi, Kahiu challenges the pessimistic representation of African realities and futures by using the aesthetics of Afrofutirism to demonstrate African-led creativity.[6] Furthermore, in an interview with Variety, Kahiu says she enjoys the genre of sci-fi for its "flexibility" and "the ability to use metaphors to say a lot more challenging things about the politics or social climate in Africa."[24]

Kahiu has critiqued the ways in which Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) control the popular imagination of Africa. She has expressed that how you get money to be able to be a filmmaker in Kenya is through making films about whatever NGOs are funding – films that are about AIDS or female genital mutilation.[25] These images, Kahiu says, reconstitute Africa as the Other.

Kahiu situates her work as a filmmaker making films about Africa to combat these images. She says her films are for the next generation: "Because we have children that we are bearing, and because there are people already here now who exist (my daughter exists now), that we are telling stories to: we need to be very clear about the messages we're putting out."[25]

In an interview with Vogue Italia, Kahiu says: "We have to be careful and sensitive, like in my film Pumzi we have to be the mother of mother nature and if we are not mother of mother nature than mother nature will stop mothering us."[4]