Swahili is ready for its closeup

Josiah Kibira

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Plymouth filmmaker and Swahili speaker Josiah Kibira is about to begin production on a second film made in his native language.

By Mary Hudetz, Star Tribune

Last update: June 22, 2007 – 5:03 PM.

Whether he's starting his day at his home in Plymouth or saying the "Lord's Prayer" at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis, Josiah Kibira often opts to speak Swahili, even if few others around him understand his words.

He was 23 years old when he left the shores of Lake Victoria in Bukoba, Tanzania, to attend Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., where he watched television for the first time in a dormitory. He left with a degree in business and wondered what it would take to be able to watch TV programs and movies in his own language, which is estimated to have 100 million speakers, but is not often heard onscreen.

"Why not in Swahili?" he remembers asking.

Two decades later, in 2003, he answered his own question by writing a screenplay called "Bongoland" that included dialogue in Swahili and English. Since then he has also made "Tusamehe," the story of a man in America and originally from the fictitious African country of Bongoland who learns he is HIV positive. This week, he'll be in Tanzania to produce his third movie, "Bongoland II."

The plot of the first "Bongoland" centers on Juma, an immigrant who came to the Twin Cities in search of the American Dream but left learning that the place still deemed by some as the "land of milk and honey" isn't always so sweet, especially for an undocumented worker.

Kibira named the movie "Bongoland," for the fictitious African country where Juma is from. To film the movie, he used a Canon digital camera and put together a 14-member cast, most of whom were volunteers. He used Apple's Final Cut Pro, a software widely used by independent filmmakers, to edit it on his computer at home, while also hiring an editor to help.

The final product was a 100-minute film that follows Juma -- at times with an unsteady camera -- through his crumbling love life and low-paying jobs.

Undiscouraged by denied grant applications, Kibira, who makes a living doing work for Solutia Consulting, paid for most of the film himself with some fundraising and help from individual donors. He has since sold some of the film's 600 copies on his website, www.kibirafilms.com (trailers are posted at YouTube.com).

As he prepares to make his next movie, "Bongoland II," which has a $30,000 budget, he said he doesn't plan to halt production to wait for grants to come through.

"What if they don't?" he asked. "Then that's one more year we don't have a Swahili movie."

When Kibira is in Tanzania filming "Bongoland II," he'll also have a seven-member crew and 10 student interns from the University of California at Los Angeles doing production work on the set. With a Tanzanian cast, the movie will be filmed entirely in Swahili. English subtitles will be added to the DVD for its release, which is slated for this fall.

Kibira's aim is to make one Swahili-language movie each year, he said, and sell them to U.S. universities with Swahili-language programs, as well as distribute them in Africa, where a lot of the television programs, such as "Bugs Bunny" and "Days of Our Lives," come from the United States.

"Why should we continue to see our culture through other people's art?" he asked.

"Bongoland II" centers on Juma's return to his home country.

"Will he or will he not succeed?" asks Kibira, who writes some of the film's scenes based on his own experiences. "The obvious is Juma is a big shot or life is good."

Uninterested in the obvious, Kibira plans to end the movie "with a big question mark."

Mary Hudetz • 612-673-4109

Source: Star Tribune, Minneapolis, St. Paul - Minnesota.