Calgary director Kiana Rawji turns her lens toward slums of Nairobi with 'Mama of Manyatta'

Calgary director Kiana Rawji shot the documentary film Mama of Manyatta on location in Nairobi, Kenya.(Photo courtesy Kiana Rawji)

Two films shot in Kenya by a director and writer based in Brooklyn who grew up in Calgary are getting their Calgary premiere screening Saturday.

Mama of Manyatta and Inside Job are the latest works by Kiana Rawji, whose first documentary film, Long Distance, explored the Cargill controversy over a COVID breakout during the pandemic.

Long Distance explored the story of the trials and tribulations of Canadian foreign workers who found themselves caught in a pandemic that left them too sick to work but too poor to stay home.

Rawji learned about that one when she returned from Boston, where she was a Harvard undergrad, to Calgary to live with her parents during the pandemic.

For her second documentary, Mama of Manyatta, Rawji turned her lens to Nairobi, where her parents lived in the 1970s.

The film tells the story of one extraordinary woman from a Kisumu slum called Manyatta who fought back against HIV and gender-based violence.

Rawji learned about the woman through her sister who worked with an NGO in Kisumu through a college summer progra.

“She was assigned to work with this woman and her CBO (community based organization) and she sort of fell in love with the community and what they were doing and told me there was a story there that I needed to tell,” Rawji said.

As AIDS spread throughout Africa in the 1990s, she said, many people viewed it as a curse that afflicted unlucky people – in Mama of Manyatta, the woman is fired from her job for having HIV because the school she teaches at thinks she will spread it to students, but instead she fights back against the misinformation that has taken over the community.

“She was an incredible human being; the living definition of extraordinary,” Rawji said.

Calgary director Kiana Rawji on location in Nairobi, Kenya, where she shot Mama of Manyatta and Inside Job, which are screening Dec. 7 at Cardel Theatre in south Calgary. (Photo courtesy Kiana Rawji)

Inside Job

The second film, Inside Job, is a fictional exploration of life in Nairobi in the 1970s, where South Asians and Africans co-existed in an uneasy relationship that also permeated communities throughout East Africa, in countries like Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

“It’s a fiction film based on my family history,” Rawji said. “Based on thesis work I did at Harvard. I was looking into the South Asian diaspora in East Africa.

“Growing up in Canda it was jarring to learn that there was so much animosity and segregation in the world that my parents grew up in,” she added. “There was this very strict racial hierarchy.

“And the only real realm of interracial engagement in the post-colonial period, in the '70s, was in households, because virtually every south Asian family had Black African domestic workers.

"So I was really interested in exploring that relationship.”

In addition to CIFF, where Long Distance won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Alberta Short Film in 2021, Rawji’s films have been screened at film festivals in Tanzania, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles.

She’s currently living in Brooklyn, where she’s prepping a new film project set in Kenya.

Rawji’s goal is to turn stories about small lives in places like the slums of Nairobi or the Cargill meat processing plant in High River, Alberta into universal tales that help in some small way, to change things – one little life at a time.

“What I envision in the films I make starts with social justice issues that I care about or personal stories that I feel compelled to tell – and my goal is that they have a wider social impact and that’s what I’m hoping to continue with this Calgary screening,” Rawji said.

Mama of Manyatta and Inside Job screen at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Cardel Theatre, at 180 Quarry Park Blvd.

For more information about Rawji, go here.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Kiana Rawji (@kianarawjifilms)