Review: ‘Kiza’ Suffers from Incoherence and One-Dimensional Characters

It’s rare to watch different versions of the same film twice just to write one review but in the case of Kiza, a feature produced by Double Pearl Production and directed by Gilbert Lukalia, that had to be the case with technical difficulties experienced with its Nairobi premiere at Anga Diamond Cinema. This first version looked like it was hastily stitched together before being ready for an audience. The opening act, suffering most from the disjointly vertigo-inducing pace and missing key scenes, jumped from the protagonist’s nostalgic memories of the coast to settling her within the chaotic hustle of Nairobi. 

Now, the second version screened at its Mombasa premiere fixed a lot of these first act issues, grounding the characters better and setting a much smoother tone to the film, but the major gripes with Kiza lie in its soul and execution, which sadly can’t be fixed without a total rewrite.

The narrative oscillates between the crime-ridden streets of Nairobi and the rural beaches of Mombasa, following our protagonist, Furaha, as she endeavours to combat injustices plaguing her coastal home while uniting with friends in the city. Despite confronting unknown forces, she finds help from unexpected sources, and her well-mannered nature reconciles her friends’ lost paths. On the surface, Kiza presents itself as an outlet for important thematic concessions, from suicide and mental health to unemployment as the root of crime, corruption within our institutions, and the role of love in a society deprived of it. Yet the clear lack of subtlety or distinct identity within the dialogue hampers these crucial messages from rooting themselves in the characters’ emotional arcs. And despite more scenes added to the film with its new version, Kiza still manages to aimlessly shift through conversations without flair, humour, or spectacle.

And the characters, for lack of better descriptions, are hallowed shells devoid of genuine intention or want. Shix Kapienga plays Furaha, adopting the accent and pensive manner of a coastal girl yet barely curving her presence in the film; her rebellious grit only emerges at the end of the film, spending most of the time annoyingly lumbering helplessly in an underwritten love triangle. By her side, Robert Agengo (Onyi) is introduced as this maniacal criminal who, throughout the film, cowers under his own indecisive nature that shifts from detached monologues to hammed stammers. The other two friends, played by Manasseh Nyagah and Wambui Ngari, drift in and out of the narrative without any intelligible place other than blank walls for the others to bounce words off. It becomes painfully amusing watching characters arrive at their actions, acts of goodness overexplained, love underdeveloped, and conflict stripped of the nuanced detail that progresses for a fulfilling drama. The actors can only do so much with the material at hand, and try as they might, there was no redeeming some of the expository and dreary dialogue they were given to work with.

While the editing of Kiza’s first version stripped away any pulse or rhythm the film could have used to stand on, the second version finds some polish within the scenes, with more layers in between to tack down the scenes. This final version, however, still bears scenes that go on for ages, and others are cut short too soon, with a lack of cohesion or resolve in the sequencing. For a narrative that feels like it would have needed more than two hours of runtime, the eighty minutes somehow feel too long. The production, clearly inhibited by a limited budget, does manage to stretch itself through counties and varied locations, even springing in an original score in the background and a large number of extras. There are a lot of teething foibles with the direction and feel, and except for beautiful drone shots, there is little style in place of the little substance.

Kiza is a case of a film that relies too heavily on the familiarity of its cast to hide the blemishes in everything else. The stars, confined to one-dimensional characters, rarely showcase their acting prowess. Nothing says it more than Dedan Juma who plays an indistinguishable character from the one he played in Pepeta which he’s exceptional in, yet in Kiza, it comes out as all bark, no bite. By the end of both versions of the film, the plot recoils into a garbled, soulless conclusion that slackly ties down the major plotline, discarding the conflicts and characters as nothing more than fodder for the runtime. It was a painful watch both times, and for a film with an intriguing concept that could have added a layer of coastal groove into the all too familiar Nairobi crime scene repeated too many times, Kiza is a disappointment through and through.