Nairobi journalist Bea Wangondu is visibly moved following the world premiere of Kikuyu Land, the new documentary she co-directed with Emmy Award–winner Andrew H. Brown that delves both into a contentious land battle and her own family history. When she recovers, she shares with the Festival audience at Park City’s Yarrow Theatre her ambitions for the film and the origins of her partnership with Brown: “I knew it’s not a small story, I knew it had to do with colonization,” Wangondu says. “I knew it was a big story, and I’d seen what he’d done previously, so [I said], ‘Let’s do the story,’ and this is what we made.”

What they made is extraordinary. Screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, Kikuyu Land was filmed across Kenya, often at various undisclosed farms, which were kept secret to protect participants’ identities. In the opening frames, the filmmakers introduce Stephen, a bright boy living on a tea plantation who offers a particularly profound insight: “I think everyone has two stories — one that the world sees and one that they keep to themselves.”

Wangondu and Brown set out to excavate the hidden story of Kenyan history. Early on, they juxtapose archival footage of Sir Evelyn Baring, colonial governor of Kenya from 1952–59, talking about plans for agricultural development of the fertile Kikuyu land with aerial footage of modern Nairobi. A radio report announces a new court ruling: Citizens will have a limited window to file historical land injustice claims with the National Land Commission. The ruling offers citizens a legal pathway to seek compensation for the first time in Kenya’s history.

Wangondu explains that, to the Kikuyu people, land is identity, and their ancestral land is now home to numerous tea plantations owned by a small number of wealthy Kenyans and multinational corporations. The film then introduces another central character, Mungai, an engineer by trade who estimates that the land stolen from his family by white colonizers would be worth $967 million today. “You cannot fathom this unfairness,” he says in the film. “You cannot actually put it in better words.” 

It was Brown who encouraged Wangondu to embark on the production after the pair met in 2021 while on assignment for National Geographic. “Bea was always the producer for some Western crew that flew in, and she would arrange everything,” Brown says. “I remember making calls back to New York, and saying, like, ‘Why the hell are we sending in producers and directors from New York? We have Bea over here. She can run the whole thing.’ So I started telling Bea, ‘You need to start telling your own stories. … And don’t let anybody tell you no. You go direct your film.’ Then, after a few months she called me and said, ‘Hey let’s do it together — and you can’t say no.’”

“Since being a small girl,” Wangondu says, “I had questions, and my dad encouraged me to ask questions. He was a teacher. He had all these books at home — the history of Greece, the history of Ethiopia — but when it came to our history, he would not tell me things about, let’s say, revolutionary leaders of our country. He would be quick to almost make sure that I keep to the education system of Kenya. So when I asked him questions like, ‘What do you mean that this white man discovered the only mountain that we have in Kenya? Where were our grandmothers?’ he had a problem with that. So I got dismissed a lot. This is the one thing that I couldn’t reconcile, and I felt like it stopped me from being who truly I was. I thought, OK, I need to work on something that’s [for] me.”

Once the project was underway, the co-directors relied on locals like Mungai and self-described “tea child” Joseph Njenga, who spent his youth on a plantation, to help them follow the story (both attended the premiere at The Yarrow). Mungai shares that despite extensive documentation, he spent years petitioning the National Land Commission to have his ancestors’ property returned to him to no avail. So, when he was approached about appearing in the documentary, he agreed, even though doing so put him at risk of reprisals.

“She asked me, ‘Would you be interested in joining us and tell your story?’” Mungai says. “Well, I reflected deep, and I thought, after all the promises, after all the declinations we had from the commission, why don’t I have another megaphone to make my story loud? Because we, in our small way, had tried to engage CNN. We had tried to engage the BBC. We had even tried to engage our local broadcasting stations, but they made a big loud silence. So, this documentary came to me as a big megaphone, so that if we put it on a big screen, it would be echoing worldwide.”

Asked about the nature of their collaboration, Brown explains, “Bea … was in front of the camera and we were letting her discover things in real time and keep that sight line there. I was holding footage and trying to sit with it to put it together. So she’s collecting puzzle pieces, handing them to me, and I’m trying to figure them out.”  

The expertise of the members of the Kikuyu community, like Njenga, who is a producer on the film, helped shape the documentary, Brown says. Without him, they would not have been able to obtain the footage they captured of young Stephen on the plantation, for example. “What we found in Stephen was a boy with very deep questions and thoughtful questions,” Brown says. “We just allowed his curiosity to [lead us].”

As the Q&A session comes to a close, Njenga is the last to speak: “It’s amazing how there is power in a people. I’ve been part of a community. As I say in the film, I’m a tea child. But that identity is just that in itself. But when you have outside people who come and see a different light of things, now you’re able to realize that you’re not alone. You’re part of a larger community. Honoring and respecting the norms and values of a community is what makes a story a story. It’s not individualistic, but it’s communal. It’s a people, and that resonates across the globe.”