A Hot Sun Foundation graduate filming in Kibera, 2018. Photo: Hot Sun Foundation
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Kibera Film School: the Olympic estate house that sent Kibera stories to Santa Barbara.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects' own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
The Kibera Film School opened in August 2009 in a house in Olympic estate. It was run by the Hot Sun Foundation, a charitable trust registered in Nairobi in June 2007, the non-profit arm of Hot Sun Films, the company founded by American director Nathan Collett. Kenyan producer Mercy Murugi was a co-founder.
Kibera Kid
Hot Sun's first film was Kibera Kid (2006), a 12-minute short made for about US$25,000 with Ignatius Juma in the lead. It took an honourable mention at the Angelus film festival in 2006, a College Television Award in 2007, and nominations at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Student Emmys. The BBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera all covered it.
Togetherness Supreme
The feature that followed, Togetherness Supreme, was shot in Kibera in April 2009 and released in 2010. It won Best International Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2011 and the Global Landscape Award at Cinequest. At the 2010 Africa Movie Academy Awards, Wilson Maina won Most Promising Actor and the film took Best Child Actor; Geoffrey Ong'ong'o won Best Supporting Actor at the Kalasha Awards. In September 2010 a road show took free open-air screenings across Kenya.
How the school worked
"We advertised in the slum," Murugi told The Location Guide in 2010. Applicants submitted three story ideas. Nine were taken in the first year; by 2013 the six-month course was taking about 12 students a year on subsidised fees, with volunteer mentors from the industry and video classes with Blood Diamond screenwriter Charles Leavitt. Graduates ran Kibera TV, a web channel started in May 2010 that put out two shorts a week. The school won a Sh100,000 Safaricom Foundation award in 2012 and was funded by Belgium's Africalia from 2012 to 2014.
"This film school is like a Messiah that came to Kibera," alumnus Vincent Oduor told Capital FM in 2012. Murugi went on to produce the Kenya segment of Girl Rising (2013) and Brave Girl Rising (2019). KNN could not confirm whether the school is still running: its last public update we found is from 2020, and its GlobalGiving project is marked as retired.
Sources: The Location Guide, 16 Feb 2010; Capital FM, 11 Jul 2012; The EastAfrican, 19 Apr 2013; KCUR, 4 Apr 2011; Africalia, 2014; GlobalGiving; Wikipedia, Hot Sun Films.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects’ own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
The Kibera Film School opened in August 2009 in a house in Olympic estate. It was run by the Hot Sun Foundation, a charitable trust registered in Nairobi in June 2007, the non-profit arm of Hot Sun Films, the company founded by American director Nathan Collett. Kenyan producer Mercy Murugi was a co-founder.
Kibera Kid
Hot Sun’s first film was Kibera Kid (2006), a 12-minute short made for about US$25,000 with Ignatius Juma in the lead. It took an honourable mention at the Angelus film festival in 2006, a College Television Award in 2007, and nominations at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Student Emmys. The BBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera all covered it.
Togetherness Supreme
The feature that followed, Togetherness Supreme, was shot in Kibera in April 2009 and released in 2010. It won Best International Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2011 and the Global Landscape Award at Cinequest. At the 2010 Africa Movie Academy Awards, Wilson Maina won Most Promising Actor and the film took Best Child Actor; Geoffrey Ong’ong’o won Best Supporting Actor at the Kalasha Awards. In September 2010 a road show took free open-air screenings across Kenya.
How the school worked
“We advertised in the slum,” Murugi told The Location Guide in 2010. Applicants submitted three story ideas. Nine were taken in the first year; by 2013 the six-month course was taking about 12 students a year on subsidised fees, with volunteer mentors from the industry and video classes with Blood Diamond screenwriter Charles Leavitt. Graduates ran Kibera TV, a web channel started in May 2010 that put out two shorts a week. The school won a Sh100,000 Safaricom Foundation award in 2012 and was funded by Belgium’s Africalia from 2012 to 2014.
“This film school is like a Messiah that came to Kibera,” alumnus Vincent Oduor told Capital FM in 2012. Murugi went on to produce the Kenya segment of Girl Rising (2013) and Brave Girl Rising (2019). KNN could not confirm whether the school is still running: its last public update we found is from 2020, and its GlobalGiving project is marked as retired.
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
