KENYAN FILM INDUSTRY

The high times of Kenyan film industry are long gone it seems, with no prospects of development in sight, or at least nothing worth mentioning. The old generation that works at the Kenya Film Commission remembers handshakes with Hollywood producers and having tea with Meryl Strip in the savanna planes of the Masai Mara during the shoot of Out of Africa. The young generation audience might recall scenes shot in the slums of Nairobi for The Constant Gardner. And a handful of indie film buffs or filmmakers may have seen Nairobi Half Life at a film festival like DIFF. Today film distribution in Kenya is made of blockbuster from the USA (90%) and from Bollywood (10%), grossing good figures for a low income market like Kenya and such a small number of screens.

As in many developing countries, since the 90s in Kenya, TV has slowly taken local audiences and film-making craftsmanship away from cinema. Old theatres were abandoned, and the government never really cared to build a proper film industry, focusing its efforts on hard issues but forgetting that arts and culture contribute to building a national identify, to gathering multi-ethnic groups around a shared patriotism and can actually serve economic sectors like tourism.

The new generation of Kenyan artists is dying to tell their stories and even make a living in the film business in the service production sector for co-productions. They have the talent, the skills and the will. Kenya's variety of locations, faces and access to Great Lakes region could compete international to attract again international productions.

As incredible as it seems, The Kenya Film Commission is a few years old only, so we hope to see it pull up its socks and contract win-win partnerships with lateral commissions on tourism, trade, etc– to develop strong incentives and packages to attract co-productions and build the local industry. It would be a shame to have set it up only to sign off film permits for another wildlife documentary or another sobbing story of poor Kenyans. In this, it should follow the footsteps of film commissions in South Africa, and get lessons learnt from the NFVF.

To be continued...