Wanjeri Gakuru
The filmmaker's decade of storytelling
Judy Kibinge’s most endearing quality is her laugh. But don’t let it fool you: she’s as tough as nails. The celebrated filmmaker, writer and artist has trudged across the barren desert that is the Kenyan film industry for a decade.
And she is still going strong. The art of storytelling has always been in her blood but the road to filmmaking was not exactly direct.
Born in Nairobi in 1967, she moved to the US a few years later and won a major children’s writing competition when she was just seven years-old. She returned to Kenya a little later and after studying in Manchester, she joined advertising firm McCann Erickson Kenya, where she stayed for eight years.
“At some point, I began to feel that there must be more to life than spending long hours in the office creating stories, emotions and feelings around a brand,” she says. The same thing that drew her to advertising – the art of combining visual elements with words – pushed her towards filmmaking. But she wanted to tell a different story: the Kenyan story. “I’d never heard a storyline about the Nairobi I lived in.
Yet I knew what life in a suburb in Australia was like, or understood intimately life in Los Angeles, New York or India ... through movies,” she says.
By now Kibinge was creative director at McCann Erickson Kenya, the first non-expatriate in the job. Then a crisis – an unhappy, fussy client and the death of a close colleague – persuaded her to take a leap of faith.
In October 1999, she resigned and set up an office at home. Soon, she was inundated with commissions from friends and strangers, asking her to make documentaries or children’s programmes.
Kibinge was eager to learn and quick on her feet. She loved the travel, especially trips to West Africa where, she says, her eyes were opened to new worlds only accessible to a filmmaker. “What other career would have you sitting under a tree in Senegal eating jollof rice with a group of Francophone village women, or walking through a village in Ghana talking to farmers about maize yields?”
But she didn’t forget the stories at home. After all, the dearth of Kenyan films was one of the main reasons she got into film. In 2000, she applied to direct a film for South African M-Net’s New Directions series. She was chosen and produced her first dramatic, short film, The Aftermath.
A few months later, fellow director Njeri Karago, a film titan in her own right and one of Kibinge’s greatest influences besides Quentin Tarantino, asked her to co-write and direct Dangerous Affair. The film about relationships between young people in Nairobi was released in 2002 and won the overall prize at the 2003 Zanzibar Film Festival. In 2004, Kibinge joined forces again with Karago to co-direct comedy Project Daddy.
In 2006, she founded her own production company, Seven, and continued to bring tales of urban Nairobi to life in documentaries such as Coming of Age and Peace Wanted Alive. Her favourite film is Killer Necklace, which won a Kalasha Award in 2009. It shows the sharp divisions between rich and poor in Nairobi.
Kenyan filmmakers have sometimes complained that Kenyans don’t watch homegrown movies. Kibinge says the debate needs to be flipped on its head.
“How do we get local investors on board to heavily invest and allow us ... to distribute and rake profits from films? That’s the question I would love to find an answer for,” she says.
In the meantime, she is working on a documentary about the 1984 Wagalla massacre and writing two screenplays; a love story and a comedy. “ I need to do more contemporary, fun films which reflect a more frivolous side of Kenya—stylish, urban, fashionable, and even slightly elitist, but totally real,” she says.
