FILMMAKER MUGAMBI NTHINGA TALKS ABOUT HIS JOURNEY FROM BEING JOBLESS IN NEW YORK TO DIRECTING TOP KENYAN MOVIES

Renowned director and screenplay writer Mugambi Nthiga had set his eyes on advertising in the U.S while pursuing a masters. “I was determined to make New York my home,” he says. 

But when the 2008 recession hit, things changed since he couldn’t secure a job, “I was sleeping in my friend’s couch in Philadelphia, several months unemployed, all my dreams of being a hotshot ad executive out the window.

All the optimism that I had felt a year and a half ago was gone, the dependence on my friends and their benevolence, the not knowing what was going to happen next. And the entitlement that I felt because we’ve all been raised to believe that a good education means that you deserve good things. All of it came crashing down. And I just wept, cried myself to sleep.” 

Mugambi says he woke up determined to try something else, “I decided I was going to take a stab at another dream. I dream that I had postponed. I decided that I was going to become an actor again. I went home and typed up a new résumé as an actor. After many résumé submissions, little jobs starter showing up and I got some work.” 

His visa expired and he came back home and after seven months, he got a job as an ad executive in a Kenyan company. He eventually quit due to the toxicity to pursue a job in acting again, “Navigating the toxicity was harder than the job itself. I applied for an acting gig and about a week later I got a call saying I had a role on this film, Nairobi Half Life. By the time I was resigning from my job Nairobi Half Life was out and it had become a juggernaut. It had travelled the world and it was celebrated all over the place.” 

After that, things were a bit slow but they eventually picked up, “Step after step, wondering where it was going to go and the events that happened afterwards happened in these unexpected ways. I found a few acting jobs.

I started directing for the stage and then I started writing, not ads this time but stories.  And then my friend Mbithi reaches out to me and says hey, I want us to co-write a movie and that movie ended up being a film called Katikati. And my friend Likarion reaches to me and says hey, I’d like you to be headwriter on my film and I did accept the job and that film became Supamodo. 

And these two films have been seen and been loved by people in Kenya and around the world. Eventually I ended up directing my own film, Lusala. A film that was made under such difficult circumstances but one that I am coming to love more and more. The film was screened in Kenya and premiered at the Rotterdam film festival. 

But as that film was premiering, a pandemic was starting to take place around the world and by the time I came back home, a few weeks later the world had changed once more. What would have been an international film festival for the film got cut short and now here we are in the middle of the moment where everyone is trying to figure things out.”