Sunday 21st June 2009.
Lagoon Beach Hotel Underground Car Park,
Lagoon Beach, Milnerton, Cape Town,
Western Cape, South Africa.
STILLS FROM WANURI KAHIU’S FILM ‘PUMZI’!
A 20 min Sci-Fi film about futuristic Africa, 35 years after World War III, ‘The Water War’!
A series of stills photographs taken during the production of Wanuri Kahiu’s short film, ‘Pumzi’. Wanuri Kahiu, an award winning Kenyan Filmmaker, wrote and directed the film that was filmed entirely on location in the Western Cape, South Africa.
These stills specifically were taken on various locations in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa during June 2009.
The film is a futuristic work based on a devastated world without water and other precious commodities. The film, set in the Kenyan countryside, questions the price of fresh water, fresh air, fresh food and other commodities and revolves mainly around its central character, ‘Asha’. The film also focuses on how to harvest moisture, energy and food in all their varied forms in order to supply the human food chain that depends on these life precious things for their ultimate survival.
In the film Asha is a curator at a virtual natural history museum in the Maitu Community located in the Eastern African territory. Outside of the community, all nature is extinct. When she receives a box in the mail containing soil, she decides to plant a seed in it. The seed starts to germinate instantly. Despite repeated instructions from her superior to throw out the soil sample, she appeals to the Council to grant her an exit visa to leave the community and plant the seed. Her visa is denied and she is evacuated from the Museum. Asha decides to break out of the inside community to plant the seed in the ‘dead’ outside. She battles with her own fear and apprehension of the dead and derelict outside world to save the growing plant.
Essentially Asha embarks on a personal quest that becomes her journey of self discovery and spiritual awakening that causes her to question her own existential role in this world. The film flows like its other character, ‘Water’, and leads us all to a realization that a world without water and a life without understanding and spirituality is absolutely no world and no life at all!
PICTURE: MARK WESSELS. 21/06/2009.
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