Kiana Rawji: “Filmmaking is about committing to authenticity”

Kiana Rawji is an award-winning South Asian filmmaker born in Canada although her family history is rooted throughout East Africa particularly Kenya. She has produced, directed, and written films which have been made in and screened across the US, Canada, and East Africa.

In this interview with KBC Digital she talks about how her upbringing influenced the stories she tells and how she approaches these sensitive topics with empathy and respect.

So much of filmmaking is capturing the essence of people’s lives, and if you are dedicated to capturing that essence in all its nuance and detail, then I think more real and more just storytelling will flow. 

You were raised in Canada but your roots are in East Africa, how, would you say, has your cultural heritage shaped your identity and your work as a filmmaker?

My intersecting identities as a South Asian Muslim woman, a daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and a first-generation Canadian definitely fuel the stories I strive to tell as a filmmaker. 

My identity and heritage have naturally drawn me towards stories of diaspora and displacement, love and loss, home and human resilience. 

I’m interested in stories of people searching for identity, for home, for belonging, and grappling with questions that I have also been grappling with, myself. 

Growing up with slightly tenuous but very tangible ties to multiple places—to East Africa, to Canada, to India—has made me embrace multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction, because those things are inherent in my own understanding of who I am and where I’m from. 

I’ve learned through experience that people and places and stories can be many things all at once. 

I don’t like to tie up my stories too neatly with a bow at the end; I’m more interested in embracing the messiness, leaning into ambiguity and unanswered questions, and illustrating the multifaceted nature of people/characters, issues, and relationships with any of the films I make.

Speaking of your multifaceted heritage, what aspects of your South Asian and East African background do you feel most connected to?

Kenya has always held a special place in my heart, as it was my parents and grandparents’ birthplace and I grew up visiting often.

My family goes back three generations in East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania). Before that, our family history traces back to India, and when I grew up in Canada, my household was infused with both South Asian and Kenyan cultural elements.

I ate Kenyan-Indian food at home, and my parents and grandparents spoke an East-Africanized version of Gujarati, an Indian language.

So even in Canada, I felt this connection to my heritage through food, language, and culture. So much of our culture as a diaspora (the South Asian diaspora in East Africa) was intertwined with and baked into Kenyan culture.

For instance, things like chapati and chai came from South Asian influence but they’ve become so integrated in Kenyan food culture that people think of them as native staples, and don’t even remember their origins anymore.

My identity and heritage have naturally drawn me towards stories of diaspora and displacement, love and loss, home and human resilience

Is language a big part of the Kenyan culture you connect to?

It’s funny because, since the Swahili my parents and grandparents spoke was a kind of “kitchen Swahili” or broken Swahili, I now speak Swahili better than them because I actually learned it at Harvard and have used it in my films in Kenya.

I remember the first Swahili word I learned was mwananchi, because I remember traveling to Kenya with my mother as a child and hearing her bargain at markets.

The locals would call her a mzungu and she’d insist that she was a mwananchi and wanted the “mwananchi price”.

We used to joke in our family that she should carry her Kenyan passport around, or even wear a T-shirt that said “mwananchi”.

There’s so much love and nostalgia in the way my family talks about their lives in East Africa.

I grew up hearing stories about the smell of Kenyan soil, drinking masala chai on the verandah, licking greasy fingers after eating fresh bhajia at Diamond Plaza.

I believe you go into a bit of your family history in your films.

I’ve wanted to make a film based on my family’s history, which led me to my film ‘Inside Job’.

The film gave me an opportunity to vividly imagine my family’s history and what their everyday lives were like back in the 70s/80s East Africa in a much deeper and richer way than I ever had before.

It’s often hard to claim either cultural identity—Kenyan or South Asian—as my “own”, or claim that I “belong” to either, but what I do know is that both are part of my family’s history — and they both run in my blood, influencing the way I move through the world and the kinds of stories I want to tell.

I aim to engage directly with people, embracing the precious moments that are not mediated by a camera lens, and immersing myself in the lives of others to portray their lives more authentically

How do you balance the narrative between local authenticity and your perspective as someone who was raised outside the region?

With each of the films I’ve made in Kenya so far, I made sure they were deeply informed by locals who knew more than me, and I believe strongly in the power of collaboration and relationships.

Inside Job was based, as I mentioned, on original interviews—with both East African Asian employers and black East African domestic workers—who currently live or have lived in the region, and who lived through the very history I was trying to depict on screen. 

My whole script was informed by these interviews and lived experiences; almost every detail and line of dialogue can be traced back to something real I learned from people’s real stories/lives. 

Then, when putting together my production team, it was important to me to assemble an entirely local cast and crew, which I did and they were all so incredible to work with, especially since the film moves fluidly between languages—English, Swahili and Gujarati. 

I sought out local actors who spoke these languages fluently and natively so that they could improvise freely with their lines, infusing the story with their own authentic touch. 

Does this method also apply to ‘Mama of Manyatta’?

With Mama Of Manyatta, my documentary in Kisumu, it was important to me to spend time with the community there and engage with them before, during, and after picking up my camera. 

With any documentary, especially one that’s character-based, you have to spend time with and truly care about the people whose stories you are depicting, and build trust. 

I don’t intend to be a filmmaker who lives entirely behind her lens, observing, recording, and then leaving without a trace. 

I don’t believe in being a fly on the wall, or an outsider looking in from behind a barrier without making active efforts to cross that barrier as much as possible. 

I aim to engage directly with people, embracing the precious moments that are not mediated by a camera lens, and immersing myself in the lives of others, whether through dancing, laughing, sharing meals or conversations, in order to understand others better and portray their lives more authentically. 

Overall, I aim to use rigorous research, genuine engagement, and collaboration to fill my own blind spots when engaging with stories I feel connected to but have not directly lived through, myself. 

At the same time, I think my outsider perspective can also be an advantage and offer a unique point of view. 

It allows me to take a bird’s eye view, and sometimes a more objective one as well. For example, with Inside Job, I wanted to expose the racism on both sides, making both brown and black Kenyans reckon with their own biases and see each other in new ways. 

I had no interest in painting a flattering portrait of any one group. And being raised in very multicultural societies (Canada and the US), different from the one my parents were raised in, where most of my friends are from different racial/cultural backgrounds, I think it’s valuable to bring that perspective to a film like Inside Job, where race is a central topic caught up with so many painful emotions of betrayal and belonging.

It can be hard to see and disentangle those intricacies objectively if you’re standing right in the middle of that knot. 

I was drawn to the potential of film to shape culture, illuminate social justice issues, and reckon with hard truths.

Did your personal family history inform this exploration and disentanglement, and what did you discover in the process?

Yes, my family history was a big part of my exploration. 

I interviewed many family members and family friends in my research. I was surprised to find such a range of dynamics and perspectives. 

There were South Asian employers who denied that they ever saw or treated their workers as anything other than “family” (unwilling to admit that intimacy and exploitation could exist alongside each other), while others were overcome with guilt and shame as they confessed to me the inhumane ways they treated their domestic workers in the 1960s-80s. 

I was surprised to see that some racialised stereotypes and generalisations still existed, but also surprised to see that some people had managed to transcend barriers in some ways.

For example, the end of Inside Job is directly inspired by a family member of mine whose parents left all their belongings, properties, businesses, etc. to their domestic workers when they were forced to leave Uganda.

And there were stories of people going back to East Africa (most of my family left in the 70s with the wave of South Asians fleeing the region) and now being able to share meals with black Africans as equals, something that never would have happened in the 70s. 

There were both shocking instances of enduring racism but also hope for a more egalitarian future. 

These are complex social issues that both those films examine,  what prompted you to focus on such issues?

In my first year of college at Harvard, I took a class called Social Justice and The Documentary Film.

I was drawn to the potential of film to shape culture, illuminate social justice issues, and reckon with hard truths. 

It was after that class that I became a filmmaker, and so from the beginning of my journey in film, I was drawn to its power to engage with pressing and complex issues of our time. 

With Mama, I was already drawn to issues around women and gender, care/caregiving and poverty.

Mama Phelgone, the subject of the film, acted as a caregiver for so many people and built a community of care around her. 

My mother has done a lot of global development work in healthcare, and from a young age, she infused in me a passion for international development and poverty alleviation; when I was in high school, I started a girls’ entrepreneurship development program in an impoverished school in Kangemi and a girls’ school in Zanzibar.

Since I was already deeply interested and invested in the issues that Mama is about, when I was introduced to Phelgone through my sister (who had worked with Phelgone’s organization through a summer global health program connecting college students with NGOs and CBOs in Kenya), I was immediately pulled in.

When I saw the immense impact she had in her community, how people looked up to her, and the urgency of the issues she was helping people deal with, I knew that I needed to make a film about her and highlight the critical work she was doing. 

I remember when I first visited Manyatta and learned that 1 in 3 girls there were HIV positive, I was shocked. 

In the US and Canada especially, not many people understand just how prevalent an issue HIV/AIDS still is, and how closely intertwined it is with gender-based violence.

Many in the West think that HIV/AIDS is a problem of the past, one that has already been solved, so I thought it was imperative to highlight that this is still an issue and we need to pay attention to it.  

With Inside Job, as I mentioned, I wanted to make a film about my family history, and having been raised in a multicultural society, I was shocked to learn of the deep-seated racial resentments, fear, and even hatred that existed (and to some extent still exist) in postcolonial East Africa, when my parents were growing up. 

I’ve long been passionate about pluralism, a cosmopolitan ethic, and engaging with people across all kinds of differences—racial, cultural, religious, etc.—because these are values I was raised with, especially as an Ismaili Muslim. 

So, I was naturally interested in the racialized tensions of the 70s/80s, and as I did more and more research, I became more and more interested. 

I found domestic labour relationships to be one of the most common yet most understudied realms of black-brown interracial relations and engagement during this time period, so I came to focus on the East African Asian household as a microcosm for the political sphere. 

It was very hard to continue editing the film after she passed away, so I drew from the very strength I witnessed in and learned from Phelgone.

Going back to ‘Mama of Manyatta’, this serves as both a documentary and a tribute to Phelgone Jacks. How did her passing during the editing of the film influence the final version and your emotional connection to the project?

Phelgone was diagnosed with metastatic cancer very soon after I finished shooting Mama Of Manyatta in the summer of 2022. 

When she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of my editing, I was devastated. The world lost a true hero. 

While she was the living definition of extraordinary with her wellspring of generosity, uncompromising selflessness, and unbridled love, Phelgone was also so beautifully and completely human. 

She giggled and cried. She struggled with the challenges of poverty but also cultivated such joy in her life and the lives of others. 

Her passing was one of my first personal experiences with grief—with mourning someone I admired, cherished, and loved.

It was very hard to continue editing the film after she passed away, so I had to take a short break. But then I returned to the material, drawing from the very strength I witnessed in and learned from Phelgone. 

The experience also gave me a deeply emotional and spiritual relationship to my filmmaking practice. I felt a sense that I was meant to make films and tell stories that are much bigger than myself. And it made me start to believe more in fate and destiny, because that’s how I met Phelgone.

 I felt very lucky to have met her, loved her, and been able to make this film in honour of her. 

Is it hard to highlight such sensitive subjects without sugarcoating the realities?

I think it’s important to balance both light and darkness, not privileging one over the other, but embracing the reality of both. 

In all my films, there are heavy moments and lighter ones. There are big issues and small moments of joy. There are tears and there is laughter. I am a strong believer that stories of injustice and suffering are incomplete without the stories of endurance and resilience that have always, throughout history, co-existed alongside them. 

But it’s not about coming up with some formula to perfectly balance the two things. It’s about committing to authenticity and specificity. 

If you closely observe, thoroughly research, and stay true to people’s real lives and experiences, I believe the result will end up being a story that naturally includes both the harsh realities and the moments of beauty that are part of everyday life. 

So much of filmmaking is capturing the essence of people’s lives, and if you are dedicated to capturing that essence in all its nuance and detail, then I think more real and more just storytelling will flow. 

The film community in Kenya has so much energy—everyone I’ve worked with there has been so passionate, excited, and talented and I’m excited to continue tapping into that electric energy

I believe you’re working on a new project, could you share more details about it and how it connects to the themes of your previous work?

One of the new projects I’m working on is another Kenyan-centered story. 

It will be a fictional film, based (at least partly) on a woman I love very much who has worked for my family for over 25 years as a domestic worker and caregiver. 

She grew up in a slum in Kenya and began working for a South Asian family in Nairobi when she was 17. 

Decades later, she ended up in Canada, working with my family. This new film will be a natural extension of my previous work, because she’s a character who traverses both worlds of my last two films; she comes from the world of Mama Of Manyatta but has spent her entire adult life living and working in the world of Inside Job.

That’s a great way to put it, so similar themes from your previous projects will be explored.

It will engage with the themes I’ve long been interested in: women, gender, care/caregiving, diaspora/displacement, home, identity, and belonging.

 I’m still in the early research and development phase for this project but I’m excited to come back to Kenya to make this film and hopefully many more there.

Are there other stories you are eager to bring to light or work on in the future?

There are so many more stories I want to tell. I’d love to make a bigger project (perhaps a feature or a series) on South Asians in East Africa; the history of the diaspora there is so rich and multi-faceted, and Inside Job was just one dimension of it.

I’m also interested in illuminating other important East African social issues, especially concerning women, gender, violence. 

Many of the issues raised in MAMA OF MANYATTA could easily spin off into entire films of their own.

The film community in Kenya has so much energy—everyone I’ve worked with there has been so passionate, excited, and talented and I’m excited to continue tapping into that electric energy in the Kenyan film scene, and hopefully contributing to it, in the years to come.