"They did not ask me to change any scenes of intimacy," Wanuri Kahiu said after the film was banned in its home country.
Wanuri Kahiu’s lesbian love story Rafiki, the first Kenyan film to compete in Cannes, has been banned in its home country.
The Kenya Film Classification Board took the step of banning the film after head Ezekiel Mutua said the homosexual scenes were illegal in Kenya.
Mutua said the script previously approved by the board had been altered, and that he will pursue legal action against the producers. However, Kahui told The Hollywood Reporter the film is “absolutely” the same as in the script. Mutua also said his objections were around romantic scenes in the film, and that he had asked the Kahiu to edit these scenes.
Kahiu counters that the board did not ask for changes to romantic scenes, and instead asked the director to change the ending of the film. “They asked me to change the ending of the film because they didn’t feel the ending was ‘remorseful’ enough,” Kahiu told The Hollywood Reporter of the meeting, which took place April 16. Kahiu said she originally told the board she would consider their suggestion but returned April 25 and declined to make the change.
“They did not ask me to change any scenes of intimacy,” she said. The film is based on Monica Arac de Nyeko’s short story Jambula Tree, which won the Caine Prize in 2007. The story sees the two lovers beaten as their community turns against them.
“If they had asked us to reduce the intimacy because of classification, that would have been one thing, and we would have gladly done that," she said. "However, the change that they were asking for was for the ending to be changed to make it less hopeful.” The director had submitted the film for an over-18 rating. Read more via Hollywood Reporter
Cannes Film Review: ‘Rafiki’
At a time when Greg Berlanti’s “Love, Simon” is belatedly bringing the subject of adolescent homosexual desire to the mall-movie crowd, along comes “Rafiki” to remind us that LGBT narratives in the mainstream are not to be taken for granted. Many international viewers would identify nothing especially subversive in Kenyan writer-director Wanuri Kahiu’s pure-hearted, candy-colored tale of first love blooming between two teenage girls in the rough streets of Nairobi. Yet at home, where homosexuality remains a criminal offense, “Rafiki” has been slapped with a ban for its positive representation — a state of affairs that makes this lively, brightly performed film impossible not to celebrate, even as its decidedly conventional script skimps on richer dramatic opportunities.
Even without the sympathetic controversy engendered by the ban, this Cannes Un Certain Regard entry would be a shoo-in for the LGBT festival circuit and distribution market, in which African queer films remain all too few and far between. Yet while “Rafiki” will receive some international arthouse play, it’s a film that would be most aptly and valuably targeted to the generation about which it has been made, who will hopefully find it through streaming avenues in years to come. For Kahiu, this sophomore feature should secure enough exposure to enable further, more ambitious vehicles for her direct, Afropop-infused style.
Kahiu and her South African co-writer Jenna Bass have adapted a short story by acclaimed Ugandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko, and the themes and tensions raised in “Rafiki” certainly apply broadly across multiple African borders. That said, the film’s unromanticized but vibrantly specific sense of place is among its most appealing assets.Read more via Variety