Wanuri Kahiu takes first Kenyan Sci-Fi short to Sundance

Kenyan Filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu takes her sci-fi short Pumzi, the first-ever Kenyan Sci-Fi to Sundance this year.

The film is a futuristic work based on a devastated world without water and other precious commodities. The film, set in the Kenyan countryside, questions the price of fresh water, fresh air, fresh food and other commodities and revolves mainly around its central character, ‘Asha’. The film also focuses on how to harvest moisture, energy and food in all their varied forms in order to supply the human food chain that depends on these life precious things for their ultimate survival.

In the film Asha is a curator at a virtual natural history museum in the Maitu Community located in the Eastern African territory. Outside of the community, all nature is extinct. When she receives a box in the mail containing soil, she decides to plant a seed in it. The seed starts to germinate instantly. Despite repeated instructions from her superior to throw out the soil sample, she appeals to the Council to grant her an exit visa to leave the community and plant the seed. Her visa is denied and she is evacuated from the Museum. Asha decides to break out of the inside community to plant the seed in the ‘dead’ outside. She battles with her own fear and apprehension of the dead and derelict outside world to save the growing plant.

Essentially Asha embarks on a personal quest that becomes her journey of self discovery and spiritual awakening that causes her to question her own existential role in this world. The film flows like its other character, ‘Water’, and leads us all to a realization that a world without water and a life without understanding and spirituality is absolutely no world and no life at all!

Pumzi “started off as a small script about what kind of world we would have to be if we had to buy fresh air,” writer/director Wanuri Kahiu told Wired.com in a Skype interview. The movie was made with grant money from Focus Features’ #Africa First short film program, the Goethe Institut, and the Changamoto arts fund. Pumzi will share the screen with two other films as part of Sundance’s New #African Cinema program.

This special program presents three films that reflect a new wave of African cinema. South African filmmaker #Jenna Bass draws from ancient mythological storytelling traditions to create a kind of historical magical realism in relating a modern-day tale of warfare in Zimbabwe in her film #The Tunnel.

Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu creates a brightly original science-fiction vision in her film Pumzi, a story of a botanist who risks everything to nurture a plant 35 years after the “Water War.” And Senegalese filmmaker #Dyana Gaye draws from the fifties- and sixties-style French musicals to breathe fresh air into Saint Louis Blues, a buoyant road-trip tale set in the clogged urban streets and dusty roads of Senegal.

Bob Hensen

","source":"PUMZI is a Sci-Fi short film written/ directed by Wanuri Kahiu. (2009)

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