The 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) will honour Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu with the ‘Spirit of Cinema’ award. The award, introduced in 2021 to honour filmmakers whose passion for cinema shines through even in the most trying of circumstances and who uses the medium as a weapon of struggle against the injustices in society, was first awarded to Kurdish filmmaker Lisa Calan. Last year, it was awarded to Iranian filmmaker and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi.
The award, carrying a cash prize of ₹5 lakh, will be presented to Ms. Kahiu at the inaugural ceremony to be held at Nishagandhi auditorium at 6 p.m. on December 8. Ms. Kahiu is known for using her cinema as a struggle against the conservative values prevalent in her home country.
Film banned
Founder of ‘Afrobubblegum’, a collective that aims at correcting common perceptions on Africa and create a new perspective on the continent, her film Rafiki became the first Kenyan film to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival. The lesbian romance, which was banned by her native country’s conservative government, was screened at the IFFK in 2018.
Under the anti-LGBTQ colonial-era laws of Kenya, homosexual acts can invite long prison sentences. The country’s certification board had demanded her to change the climax of the film, portraying one of the lesbian characters as remorseful, a demand which she refused to heed, leading to the ban.
Legal battle
She later fought a legal battle against the censor board for denying the constitutional right to freedom of expression. The court granted temporary screening permission to qualify for the Oscars, but a week later the ban was extended and later in 2020, ruled in favour of the censor board.
Though the film won accolades internationally, it led to hate campaigns against her in Kenya. Ms. Kahiu began her film career with From a Whisper in 2018, a fictional account of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, telling the story of a young girl who loses her mother in the attack. Her second film Pumzi painted a colourful representation of Africa challenging the usual pessimistic accounts about the continent. She made a documentary For Our Land on Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai.
