A second trailer for Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares' dystopian thriller, The Kitchen, has just been released, showing more glimpses of the film's hair-raising drama and heart-felt exchanges.
Described by critics as "high-energy", "fizzing with style", and with a script "tight and full of humanity", Kaluuya's directorial debut, which closed London's BFI Film Festival in October, will be landing on Netflix on Friday.
The story follows Izi (Top Boy’s Kane ‘Kano’ Robinson) who is trying to find the way out of The Kitchen, the last remaining social housing building in an alternative London, where financial inequality is crushing the spirits of many of the city’s inhabitants. He meets 12-year-old Benji (newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman) who is also searching for a new home; the two form a bond.
"We both grew up in London, and The Kitchen is a love letter to our city,” said Tavares and Kaluuya in a joint statement. "Starting a decade ago as a workshop in a local barbershop, the film’s journey from script to screen has been a continued collaboration between us, and the community of cast and crew that came to make up our ‘Kitchen’.”
Hope Ikpoku Jnr (Top Boy), Demmy Ladipo (The Last Tree), new face Teija Kabs, and musicians Cristale and BackRoad Gee star in the film alongside Robinson and Bannerman.
The Kitchen has been written by Kaluuya alongside Joe Murtagh. Murtagh wrote last year's popular BBC crime-drama The Woman in the Wall, which looked at the role of The Magdalen Laundry workhouses in Ireland, and also wrote Calm with Horses, an Irish crime drama starring Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan, which was nominated for four BAFTAs.
34-year-old Kaluuya became a household name after starring in Jordan Peele’s 2017 hit horror Get Out. He has since starred in Black Panther (2018), Widows (2018), Queen & Slim (2019), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) and Nope (2022). He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Get Out, and won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2020 for playing activist Fred Hampton in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah.
Next up he is set to be starring in, and producing, a Barney the dinosaur spin-off film from Barbie toymakers Mattel. According to Mattel Films’ vice president Kevin McKeon, the film is going to be more of a “surrealistic” take. “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids,” McKeon said to The New Yorker.
Tavares is an architect, filmmaker, founder of studio Factory Fifteen and TED Senior Fellow. In 2020 he directed Aisha and Abhaya, a Rambert and The Royal Ballet collaboration which ran at the Royal Opera House, and the same year he co-directed the BBC’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts + Crosses.
