Kenyan cinema has grown steadily in confidence since Nairobi Half Life became the country's first submission for the Academy Awards in 2012, putting local storytelling firmly on the map. Films like Supa Modo show a knack for grounding big emotional ideas in everyday Kenyan life, warm and specific without ever feeling small. Browse Macca's reviews below.
2020s
Kikuyu Land was, for me, one of the best documentaries of the year, a furious, beautiful and deeply personal film that traces an unbroken line from colonial land seizures in Kenya to the multinational tea estates still profiting from that soil today. You can read my full review here. It
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like a piece of evidence, and Kikuyu Land is one of them. Directed by the Emmy winning Andrew H. Brown and the Kenyan journalist and film-maker Bea Wangondu, it is one of the most
Country United Kingdom
Bel was, for me, one of the most moving films of the year, a tender, aching portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who recorded as Heir of the Cursed, built by director Louise Lockwood as something much closer to an act of love than a conventional documentary. You
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like an act of love, and Bel is one of those. Louise Lockwood's portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who performed and recorded as Heir of the Cursed, is a tender,
Rating: 3.5★
The first thing that'll either hook you or drive you absolutely mad is the camera work. Fernando Meirelles shoots this with a deliberately restless, almost chaotic energy, and I know plenty of critics have knocked the skewed angles and hyper-stylised framing, dismissing them as distracting or overly
Rating: 3.0★
By the time the first skiff hits the water in Cutter Hodierne's drama, I was already fighting off a severe case of déjà vu. This is roughly the fourth film I've sat through that attempts to tackle the Somali piracy phenomenon, and while the geopolitical reality
Rating: 4.0★
There is something profoundly absurd about standing before the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Colosseum, or the Louvre, monuments that have survived millennia of human history, only to watch hundreds of people experience them exclusively through the glowing rectangle of a smartphone on a selfie stick. It is one of
Genre Drama
★★★ — Supa Modo (2018)
Genre Drama
★★★ — Nairobi Half Life (2012)
Genre Documentary
★★ — Men in the Arena (2017)
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