Wanjiru
Kinyanjui

In 2022, Wanjiru Kinyanjui’s short film A Lover & Killer of Colour (1988) was shown in the “re-selected” section of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; it formed part of a program I curated called “On All Fronts,” which imagined what Black-authored films could have been included in the program “Confrontation of Cultures” in Oberhausen in 1993.¹ The following year, her first feature film, Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum (1995),was screened as part of “Fiktionsbescheinigung,” the Berlin International Film Festival’s special retrospective program focusing on the work of Black directors and directors of color in Germany.² Both films feature unique treatments of dark skin in low-light scenes. Their cinematography confronts the camera’s default visual language—a colonial construct that must be reinterpreted to effectively “communicate” with Black skin.

While the recent screening may seem like a “discovery” to European audiences, Kinyanjui’s work is well known in Kenya and she has been screening her films across the African continent for years. In her role as a lecturer, previously at Kenyatta University and currently at Multimedia University, she has mentored many students who have contributed to the independent film movement in Kenya. In 2023, Kinyanjui was honored as the “Most Influential Woman Filmmaker” by the Women in Film Awards (WIFA) Kenya. The excavation of Kinyanjui’s German films is a case study in the custodial and care work necessary for films that get lost in the liminal space between vast national contexts in European archives.

In a 2010 interview for the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Kinyanjui spoke out boldly about the importance of ensuring that artists retain their own copyrights: “You should always know when and where and (in) what (context) your product is being shown, and you should be paid for that.” This has not always been the case for Kinyanjui’s student productions in Germany.

Kinyanjui was born to two teachers in Kanyore village in Kiambu County, Kenya. After completing high school in Kenya, she pursued an International Baccalaureate at the United World College in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. While visiting her older brother, who was studying in Germany, she passed through Berlin and decided to stay. Kinyanjui went on to study English Literature and German, eventually earning a master’s degree from the Technical University of Berlin. In 1987, driven by her passion for theater, she applied to the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) to study filmmaking. In the second year of her studies, Kinyanjui began producing children’s films for Karfunkel, a television program on the ZDF network.

Alongside her filmmaking work, she also wrote poetry that was published, among others, in afro look, a Black German magazine edited by the visual artist Ricky Reiser during the 1980s and 1990s; in Aufenthalt, Collagen einer Stadt (an anthology of poetry and short stories by international writers, co-edited by Kinyanjui, Hedi Schulitz, and Alexandra Magk, and published by Das Arabische Buch in 1988); and in a poetry anthology she co-curated entitled I beg the Lord not to hear, which was published by Aufbruch Presse in 1989. Kinyanjui participated in a writing workshop led by Audre Lorde and attended a seminar with Katharina Oguntoye; these were formative experiences that played a significant role in shaping the Afro-German community and its transnational political engagement during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

During her studies, Kinyanjui made short films about the intersectional challenges with anti-Black racism in Germany. Through interviews with fellow students, including Tsitsi Dangarembga, her film Black in the Western World (1992) tackles the insidious nature of Eurocentric ideologies that impregnate German advertisements, nursery rhymes, and estimations of African art. A Lover & Killer of Colour follows a Black female painter (played by Alida Babel) through the dark streets of Berlin to her studio. It was invited to the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Mumbai Short Film Festival, the Uppsala Short Film Festival, and the Chicago Short Film Festival. Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum, Kinyanjui’s graduation project, is a Kenyan film adapted from a short story by Barbara Kimenye; the film focuses on Mumbi (played by Margaret Nyacheo), a city girl who takes refuge in her native village and challenges Christian zealots who are plotting to erase traditional customs. It premiered at the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) and was screened at several festivals, including the Mill Valley International Film Festival. It won the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award for Best Foreign Film in Oakland, California. At the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, it opened the “African Special” section.

Following the completion of her academic studies in Germany, Kinyanjui continued to contribute content for ZDF from Kenya. She collaborated with Germany-based colleagues on the collective film Trading Images (2001), together with Brigitte Krause, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Suma Josson, Casey Chan, and Yōko Tawada. In a similarly collective fashion, Kinyanjui made Africa Is a Woman’s Name (2009) with Bridget Pickering and Ingrid Sinclair. This documentary on women change-makers on the continent, including the Kenyan lawyer/politician who crafted the Sexual Offences Act, was produced by Cristina López-Palao.

Kinyanjui sees independent, local filmmaking as a poverty-reduction tool and an essential art form for Africa’s oral and visual culture of storytelling. She is currently writing two feature film scripts during her stay in Berlin. Her approach to filmmaking and form through women-centered, transnational stories continues to expand the language of cinema from a monolingual to a polyglot perspective.

Text: Karina Griffith

¹ “On All Fronts” was curated by Karina Griffith upon the invitation of Tobias Herring. See Anne Fiehn and Christian Lailach, eds., 68. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen: 30.4.–9.5.2022 = 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Oberhausen: Karl Maria Laufen, 2022), 320–23.
² For more on the third and final edition of “Fiktionsbescheinigung,” see Cristina Nord et al., “„Für manche Filmemacher*innen ist zu viel Zeit verstrichen“,” Berlinale Forum und Forum Expanded – Supplément (2023), accessed July 10, 2025, https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/forum-forum-expanded/supplement/detailseite-supplement/fuer-manche-filmemacherinnen-ist-zu-viel-zeit-verstrichen/.