Today we’d like to introduce you to Kiana Rawji.
Hi Kiana, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My name is Kiana Rawji, and I’m a filmmaker, producer, director, and writer from Calgary, Canada, with roots in East Africa and South Asia. I recently graduated from Harvard College, where I studied Film, History & Literature. I never imagined that I would be a filmmaker when I was a kid. I loved making movies for fun growing up, but I never took it seriously and figured I would become a lawyer one day. But during my first year of college, I took a course called Social Justice and The Documentary Film, and inspired by filmmakers like Ava DuVernay, Deepa Mehta, and Jehane Noujaim, I found myself irrevocably drawn to the potential of film not only to reflect, but also to probe, interrogate, and shape culture. I am invigorated by the ways in which films can speak to the unspoken and grapple with things that are unjust or uncomfortable. Through filmmaking, I strive to embrace complexity and contradiction, to reckon with truth, celebrate joy, and imagine justice. My intersecting identities as a South Asian Muslim woman, a daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and a first-generation Canadian inform the stories I want – and need – to tell. I am especially interested in stories of diaspora and displacement, love and loss, home and human resilience.
Over the past few years, I have produced, directed, and written several short films that have screened across the U.S., Canada, and East Africa. From screenings in L.A. to Toronto to Zanzibar, it has been a privilege to tell stories that matter to me and share them with audiences around the world. My 2021 documentary, LONG DISTANCE, about migrant workers at an Albertan meat plant, was honored with the Grand Jury Prize for Best Alberta Short Film at the 2021 Calgary International Film Festival and screened at several other festivals in Canada and the US. In 2022, my first fictional short film, JE SUIS, about Islamophobia in the college classroom, screened at the Vancouver South Asian Film Festival. Most recently, in 2023, I made two short films, both set in Kenya: one was a documentary, MAMA OF MANYATTA—which played at the 2023 Pan African Film Festival in L.A., Essence Film Festival in New Orleans, and Zanzibar Film Festival where it was awarded a Special Jury mention—about an extraordinary woman fighting HIV/AIDS and gender-based-violence in a slum in Kisumu, Kenya. The other film was a fictional short called INSIDE JOB, which revolved around an Indian housewife, her African domestic workers, and a jewelry theft in 1970s Nairobi; the film premiered at the 2023 Chicago South Asian Film Festival and also screened, along with MAMA OF MANYATTA, at the Nanji Family Foundation Auditorium at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto in 2023.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’ve learned a great deal about myself and my creative practice through making films, both fiction and nonfiction. One recent experience in making my 2023 short documentary, MAMA OF MANYATTA, was particularly defining for me. I remember sitting, almost two years ago, with my camera in a neon-yellow school chair under a corrugated steel roof in Kisumu, Kenya, as women lined up to share their stories. One after the other, these survivors—of rape and, consequently, HIV/AIDS—sat before me recounting what they’d been through, some in horrifying detail. The women had been in group counseling sessions led by community leader Phelgone Jacks (my documentary’s subject) for several years, and each of them told me how Phelgone had nurtured, united, and empowered them.
But what I remember most distinctly from that day wasn’t the interviews, but rather, the part when no one was speaking at all. The part when they were dancing.
In the middle of a workshop on gender-based violence and preparing for upcoming post-election violence, Phelgone sensed the air in the room growing heavy. So, she suggested a dance break.
Phelgone and the others beckoned for me to join them. The filmmaker in me was keen to capture every detail of this moment—the rhythmic body movements, the courageous smiles, the unbridled laughter. I thought something unexpected and beautiful could happen any second, and if my camera wasn’t rolling, I might miss it. But that day, I realized sometimes you also miss things when you are rolling. After filming the women dancing for a few minutes, I decided to set down my camera and join them. They showed me some moves; I was awful, they laughed at me, I laughed at me, and it was wonderful.
I went into that shoot believing in the power of the camera, but I came out of it having also learned the power of putting it down. I decided I didn’t want to be a filmmaker who lives entirely behind her lens: observing, recording, and then leaving without a trace. I want to be the kind of creator who knows when to stop being a fly on the wall and start engaging—when to be a friend, not just a filmmaker. When artists get proximate to their subjects (which sometimes requires those precious interactions unmediated by a camera lens), opening their souls and immersing themselves in the lives of others (whether through dancing, sharing meals, or conversations), the product is more authentic and fulfilling for everyone involved.
Moreover, dancing with Phelgone and the survivors cemented for me that joy and resilience would be the ethos of my film.
20 years ago, Phelgone founded a community-based organization fighting HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence in the slum of Manyatta in Kisumu. She was a mother figure to Manyatta’s young and old; she built an Early Childhood Development Center outside her home, hosted safe-sex workshops for teenage girls, counseling sessions for women survivors, and more. Though she helped people work through immense trauma, what was most remarkable about Mama Phelgone (as she was affectionately known in Manyatta) was that she cultivated strength and joy wherever she went through prayer, song, and dance. She was, in her own words, an “ambassador of hope.”
Rather than an all-too-common narrative of the suffering African poor, I wanted MAMA OF MANYATTA to present a portrait of African empowerment and leadership. In a similar vein, while my 2021 documentary LONG DISTANCE was an exposé of systemic racial injustice in Canada’s immigration system, it was also, at its core, a love story about a Filipino couple—two resolute dreamers who prevailed despite the forces working against them. When it comes to filmmaking around social issues, I am a staunch believer that stories of injustice and adversity are incomplete without the stories of resilience and endurance that invariably exist alongside them.
One of my visions as a filmmaker is to close distances between people while celebrating the differences among them. In a 2016 TEDx talk I gave called The Risk of a Dying Cosmopolitan Ethic, I explained that “a true cosmopolitan takes a step beyond mere tolerance of and blind coexistence with people who are different by seeking to actually understand, appreciate, and learn from them.” For me, filmmaking has become a way of living and practicing a cosmopolitan ethic in my own life. Filmmaking submerges me in the lives of former strangers, and I am constantly learning through the lens of my camera. (Even my fiction film, INSIDE JOB, was heavily based on research and interviews with real people; their lives and stories informed every detail of my script, from the plot to the dialogue). Something beautiful tends to come out of the intersection of our existences, whether it’s new insight or new friendship, or both. Making films encourages me to pay close attention to and learn from the people and world around me. And I find the wondrous sense of discovery that comes with it all delightful, thrilling, and enlivening.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My work deals with subject matter that is often emotionally intense, sometimes traumatic. In telling stories that involve injustice and hardship, there are plenty of times when I have felt it personally difficult to watch, let alone film, certain scenes unfolding. But my drive to expose and shed light on ugly, uncomfortable, and unjust stories has consistently overpowered my impulse to shy away. Some people say certain subject material is difficult to watch, but I always say that if it’s hard to watch, it’s probably even harder to live. And if we are lucky enough that we don’t have to live through it, we have the responsibility to pay attention, be aware, and bear witness.
As I mentioned earlier, I aim to be a filmmaker who engages deeply with her material and subjects. However, I have come to realize that my personal and emotional investment in the films I make is simultaneously my superpower and my weakness.
Soon after I finished shooting MAMA OF MANYATTA in summer 2022, Phelgone was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. She passed away in the middle of my post-production, and the world lost a true hero. While she was the living definition of extraordinary with her wellspring of generosity, uncompromising selflessness, and unbridled love, she was also beautifully and resoundingly human. She giggled and cried. She struggled with the everyday challenges of poverty but also created oases of joy in her own life (such as her impressive collection of stuffed animals with which her home was always overflowing).
Phelgone’s passing was one of my first personal experiences with grief, mourning someone I deeply admired, cherished, and loved. It became immensely difficult to keep editing my film after her passing. But I drew from the very strength I witnessed in and learned from her, and I continued editing the film with a heavy but tenacious heart. My drive to preserve her remarkable life and legacy only intensified and allowed me to finish MAMA OF MANYATTA.
The experience created, for me, a unique spiritual link between myself and my filmmaking practice. A sense that I am called to create for reasons beyond myself, to tell stories much bigger than myself, and to draw from an abundant creative source outside of myself. It stirred inside of me a sense of fate and destiny. I believe I was meant to take that documentary film class in my first year of college, and eventually meant to find myself in a slum in Kisumu, Kenya, at the time that I did, making a documentary to capture the spirit of an extraordinary woman.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
On a virtual Sundance panel a few years ago, I remember hearing author Viet Than Nguyen say that minorities in America are in a position of “narrative scarcity.” One story runs the risk of becoming the only story about any given minority group, and because of that pressure to be representative, creators don’t have the luxury of being “mediocre” or getting the story “wrong.” Historically, people of marginalized identities have been held to high and sometimes impossible standards; many women and BIPOC have been told that we have to be twice as good to even be considered. As strange as it sounds, I’m excited that we’re moving towards a film landscape where minority filmmakers can make “bad” movies too.
But more importantly, we are beginning to see a space forming in media and entertainment where “minorities” (who are actually becoming majorities) in America can exist as many different things—different kinds of characters in all sorts of genres, whether it’s a Black horror film, a brown superhero movie, or an Asian rom-com. I think independent cinema is starting to see the old monoliths that have dominated popular culture shake on their very foundations, and once those monoliths shatter, the pieces will settle into the messy, variegated, contradictory, and beautiful mosaic that I believe they’re meant to be. Stereotypes are slowly being combatted with empathy, and dehumanization combated with specificity, attention, and care. Of course, in a time when we’re oversaturated with content, there is plenty of harmful imagery still going out into the world. But the democratization of image-making means that more and more people who have been historically marginalized have the power to represent themselves and tell their own stories. And I can’t help but see it as a positive thing if we are all in the business of defining what it means to be human (after all, that is what we are doing as filmmakers, creators, and storytellers).
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kianarawji.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kianarawjifilms/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiana-rawji/
Image Credits
Michael Grondin
Sarah Kay
