Wanuri Kahiu’s ‘Pumzi’ Goes to Sundance

Yes, Sundance is closing and yes, I missed yet another opportunity to comment on Wanuri Kahiu’s 2000 short, Pumzi. Pumzi opened last October at the Kenya International Film Festival. It was also screened at the Goethe Institute, Nairobi, where I saw it, during the German Cultural Week. Time constraints mean that I still cannot express a reasoned opinion on the 20 minute film, but in the meantime, I must bring my reader’s attention to it.

In the almost desolate universe of an imagined future that Pumzi is set in:

Nature is extinct. The outside is dead. Asha lives and works as a museum curator in one of the indoor communities set up by the Maitu Council. When she receives a box in the mail containing soil, she plants an old seed in it and the seed starts to germinate instantly. Asha appeals to the Council to grant her permission to investigate the possibility of life on the outside but the Council denies her exit visa. Asha breaks out of the inside community to go into the dead and derelict outside to plant the growing seedling and possibly find life on the outside.

Wired had this to say:

Pumzi, Kenya’s first science fiction film, imagines a dystopian future 35 years after water wars have torn the world apart. East African survivors of the ecological devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.

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.

Pumzi is an Inspired Minority film.

In the meantime, watch this space for my stories from the ongoing International Film Festival Rotterdam, over the next couple of days.