In an industry where the secret ingredient to so many fan favourites can often go unseen because of being behind the screen, there are few such players with as many hits as Voline Ogutu. Ogutu has penned 40 Sticks, the Kenyan thriller that premiered on Netflix in 2020, and Anyango and the Ogre, part of Netflix’s African Folktales Reimagined short film anthology. In 2023, alongside Kahindi Yaa, she co-wrote Daudi Anguka’s Mvera, a story about a modern-day Mekatilili wa Menza and Kenya’s official entry to the Oscars 2024. She was also part of the all-female writing team in Zambian Malenga Mulendema’s Netflix animated series Supa Team 4 and wrote for Disney’s Afrofuturistic anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.
In Kifungo, her latest project, Ogutu steps into the director’s seat, a skill she’s been actively honing as she seeks to expand her filmmaking portfolio. Starring Brenda Wairimu (Disconnect) and South Africa’s Kwenzo Ngcobo (The Wife), Kifungo is part of In Bloom, an anthology of short films spotlighting global gender issues, produced by Paramount in collaboration with MTV Staying Alive Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Kifungo takes us through a graceful journey into the soul of Amina (Wairimu), a young woman who is HIV positive and is dealing with the trauma and stigma that comes from it. The film goes very deep into her psyche, with a fantastic scene that transitions from Amina having fun in the club to her being confronted by a vision of her mother, disappointed in her. Even though very brief at only twelve minutes, Kifungo is very affecting to watch.
On casting Wairimu for the lead role, Ogutu says the actress gave them what they were looking for with the character Amina. “Brenda’s audition tape was the exact interpretation of what I was after. She did something none of the other actresses did, and that impressed me, so instantly, I knew I had to hire her.”
With Mvera, director Daudi Anguka had a script for a feature film he was unsatisfied with and needed a writer with certified chops to bring it to life. He brought in Ogutu for the job. “We changed a lot of the elements in the story, working a lot on the characters and the story beats, but the basic idea was already there,” Ogutu says.
It took two rewrites to perfect the script, and the diligence was worth it. Mvera was Kenya’s official entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars 2024. Even though it didn’t make the coveted shortlist, this very writer felt it was Kenya’s first proper entry in years, even labelling the best Kenyan film in a decade in this review.
The Kalasha Awards (the Kenyan Oscars) appreciated their efforts with four awards, including Best Feature and Best Director, but none for its screenplay, which was won by Where the River Divides, a short film. Looking at her recent projects, this wasn’t really a snub to Ogutu, who is slowly making a name for herself as one of the few filmmakers in Kenya to secure deals with legacy names such as Netflix, Paramount and MTV.
For all her great achievements, Ogutu isn’t that known to audiences, even those who consume the very works she’s been involved in. How do you reach such heights while virtually invisible to the general public? Well, writers often are, but Ogutu, in particular, is an introvert of the highest degree. She’s scuttled away from attention for most of her career. Transitioning to directing, she, of course, had to come out of that shell to do the job.
Getting into directing wasn’t easy at all. “I had to self-fund my projects from the money I made from my writing gigs,” Ogutu says. That took quite some time to do, with a few mishaps here and there. “I’m a little embarrassed to say this,” she tells me with a laugh, deftly stretching the suspense as one of her characters would. “The first film I did, we finished everything. Then we had a problem. We lost the footage, and there was no way to get it back.” Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, down the drain. She was in shambles for a while but soon returned to her passion.
“I applied for grants and kept hustling until eventually I made Seed, my first writer-director project.” Seed is an award-winning short film that is also available to stream on YouTube. She later went on to write for shows such as Njora wa Uba, Crime and Justice, and County 49 before stepping into the international leagues with Anyango and the Ogre (which she also directed), Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, and now Kifungo. She’s a veritable success, not just by Kenyan standards but internationally.
She’s also a very exciting filmmaker when left to her own devices. Heavily influenced by the stories her grandmother told her as a child, Ogutu tends to explore untapped or underused genres in Kenya while tackling very human and relatable stories like she did with her dystopian fantasy short Anyango and the Ogre or even Kifungo, a thriller with horror elements. I can hardly wait to see what she does next with her horror movie, The Witch From Chaka, currently in post-production.
Kifungo is available to stream on YouTube.
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