Helping a Dream
An interview with actress and producer Sarah Wanjiku Muhoho, winner of the VFF Highlight Pitch Award and a participant in the Talent Project Market.
Sarah Wanjiku Muhoho with her co-producer James Tayler
Sarah Wanjiku Muhoho is the latest recipient of the coveted €10,000 VFF Highlight Pitch Award. The prize is bestowed every year on a participant of the Talent Project Market, where up-and-coming directors and producers get the opportunity to present their projects to co-producers and financiers involved with the Berlinale Co-Production Market. The money is intended to help realise an unfinished film project. For Muhoho, an actress-turned-producer from Kenya, this means THE BODA-BODA THIEVES, which she is co-producing with her partner, James Tayler. Guido Pellegrini sat down with Muhoho to talk motorcycle taxis, production schedules and international crews.
How did your involvement with cinema begin?
I started screen acting in 2005. It was interesting to me and I wanted to be behind the camera. So I started writing. Then I went to film school in Cape Town, in 2008, where I did my Masters in Fine Arts. I never thought I would have the opportunity to do that, because in Kenya there were no film schools.
How did THE BODA-BODA THIEVES come about?
Through my colleague, James Tayler. He had seen Vittorio de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES and was inspired. So he started to look for financing. It was a project that started with James, and I jumped on board. I think it was around April of last year that we started to work. We began applying to many funding platforms, and we were lucky to get help from several, like the World Cinema Fund, the Global Film Initiative, the South African National Film and Video Foundation, and the Hubert Bals Foundation. I am the producer and James is the co-producer and writer. Donald Mugisha will be the director.
What is the film about?
It is about a family from a rural area looking for opportunity in Kampala. Like most people who search for a better life in the city, they end up not finding it. So they’re living in poverty. The son begins to work driving a boda-boda, which is a motorcycle taxi. The family intends to pay for the bike through the boy’s earnings, and, as collateral, they put up their last piece of rural land. On the first day of work, the boda-boda is stolen, so the father and son have to find the boda-boda or they will lose their property and be completely destitute.
How will the prize money help your film?
There is so much we need to do. We need to take crew to Uganda from South Africa and Kenya, because it’s a South African, Kenyan and Ugandan co-production. So we’re bringing everyone together into this one country. The €10,000 will go a long way to help us!
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