Are films of praise and NGO fat cheques killing production?

Filmmakers and mentors at a recent Docubox workshop. Courtesy Photo 

By Mwikali lati

Kevin Kamau is graduating from the Kibera Film School next year, after six months of an intensive programme.

Eager to do his first documentary, he pitched to Docubox, an East African documentary film fund supported by the Ford Foundation, to get the funds for production.

Judged “outstanding and compelling” his idea made the list of 12 film-makers awarded $2,000 to make a trailer that will go on to compete for one of six additional $20,000 documentary film grants.

“I love documentaries because they are real. I decided to venture into documentaries to tell stories from real characters. In Kenya we got so many stories but they are not told,” he says.

He joined the film school to realise his dream as one of Kenya’s true storytellers. Not ignorant of the problems facing the sector in Kenya, Mr Kiarie knows that the perception needs to first change from how the stories are chosen to the story structures.

However, the overall feeling is that Kenyan documentaries do not capture the true Kenyan stories since many are commissioned by NGOs and companies.

Judy Kibinge, a film-maker and executive director of Docubox, quit advertising 13 years ago to make feature films. She produced Dangerous Affair, Project Daddy and Killer Necklace and most recently Something Necessary.

This is where she wanted to be but, like many Kenyan film-makers, she could not make ends meet using drama and began producing corporate and NGO documentaries to pay her bills.

“We forget that these are not true documentaries. NGOs and corporate films are like advertising,” she says.

Marc Hoeferlin is one of the mentors at Docubox and a freelance film-maker who works mostly with Lafayette Films (English documentary film-maker Nick Broomfield’s company) which produces documentaries and feature films. He points out the dominance of these types of documentaries is counteractive.

“The main problem is most Kenyan film-makers watch NGO films as their primary source of information. They are always biased and have an agenda. That is not a bad thing, that is the reality. These are the primary opportunities for the film-makers to get work. As long as that keeps happening, they are going to think that is how documentary films are made,” he says.

So, where did the film-makers lose their way? While looking for old footage at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication (KIMC) archives, Ms Kibinge made an interesting discovery. In the 1970s, Kenyan documentaries were on the right track.

“The film-makers then were filming things beautifully. One documentary features a person travelling around the country filming the games children play some which people don’t even remember today,” she says.

From that era, she noticed that there was a clear turn. “People forget how much government policy influences arts.”

In the period of one-party rule, literature took a nosedive and the films and documentaries became tools of propaganda filmed to praise and make the then ruling party look good