The Tribeca Film Festival has unveiled its 2025 lineup, with two Kenyan documentary features—Widow Champion and The Shadow Scholars—officially selected to screen at the festival running from June 4 to June 15 in New York City.
Making its world premiere at the festival, Widow Champion follows a subjugated group of widows who have lost rights to their inherited land hence turning to Rodah Nafula Wekesa – the Widow Champion. Set in rural Kenya, where tribalism and patriarchal traditions dominate, the film captures a fierce struggle for justice and resistance.
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Directed by Zippy Kimundu and produced by Heather Courtney, Widow Champion also stands as one of the final projects of acclaimed editor Franki Ashiruka, founder of Africa Post Office, who tragically passed away in a car accident in Nigeria in December 2024.
Kimundu previously co-directed Our Land, Our Freedom (2023), a documentary that follows Wanjugu Kimathi’s search for truth about her father, Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi, while also uncovering brutal British colonial atrocities in Kenya.
Investigative documentary The Shadow Scholars, a UK-Kenya collaboration, follows Oxford professor Patricia Kingori as she delves into Kenya’s ghostwriting economy, uncovering how essay mills in Nairobi fuel academic fraud in Western institutions. The film directed by Eloïse King and executive produced by Steve McQueen and Kingori.
Historically, Kenyan representation at Tribeca has been limited. Only three Kenyan films have previously screened at the festival. My Africa (2018), a virtual reality short narrated by Lupita Nyong’o, spotlighted the work of the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya. In 2023, the coming-of-age climate documentary Between the Rains, co-directed by Moses Thuranira and Andrew H. Brown, premiered in competition and won Best Documentary Feature and Best Cinematography. The following year, Searching for Amani (2024), directed by Debra Aroko, made its world premiere at the festival and earned the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director. It follows a 13-year-old boy investigating his father’s mysterious murder in one of Kenya’s largest wildlife conservancies.
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