There are not many, but not many films of a certain depth shot in Kenya with the idea of telling this country, its places, its people or at least stories that actually happened here. They range from the adventures of big game hunting and the Mau Mau war to reenactments of famous autobiographies, to more or less fictionalized news stories. We have collected what in our opinion of malindikenya.net are the most significant feature films, as well as awarded by critics and/or the public. We deliberately omitted those that simply used Kenya as a set, without mentioning it but representing it as a generic and ideal Africa for their screenplay. Good reading and, in case some of you haven't seen them yet, good future vision!
 

1.    OUT OF AFRICA

It is not only the most famous and celebrated of the films shot in Kenya, but also the one that grossed the most at the box office (over $240 million) and the one that won the most awards (11 Oscar nominations, 7 of which were sublimed in statuettes, including Best Director, Best Director to Sidney Pollack and Best Screenplay). 
Mia Africa (original title "Out of Africa"), based on Karen Blixen's novel of the same name, tells Nairobi and the Rift Valley in the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of the almost impossible love story between the Danish writer and adventurer Denys Finch-Hutton.
A Hollywood blockbuster produced without skimping on anything, from spectacular landscape photography to the unforgettable soundtrack by John Barry, it is the film that most exalts the concept of "Africa's disease". It was shot between the town of Karen, right near the real home of the Blixen, the hills of Ngong and other areas of the capital.

2.    THE CONSTANT GARDENER

Based on the fictional novel by British "spy-story" writer John Le Carré, "The constant Gardener" is a good cross-section of Kenya's new colonialism, that of multinationals and certain solidarity. The director Fernando Meirelles, in narrating the search for truth by an English diplomat on the murder of his wife, journalist and political activist, paints the majesty of a country that has always witnessed the misdeeds of others and the beauty of danger and impotence. The filming in Loyangalani, in Turkana, is beautiful and dramatic in the slum of Kibera in Nairobi.
The film, which makes use of the performance of Ralph Fiennes, not always up to the role of the charming and talented Rachel Weisz, who earned her an Oscar as best supporting actress. The film also won the Golden Globe and had two other Oscar nominations.  

3.    THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS

The film, shot between Nairobi and Mombasa, is a reconstruction of an actual event, the presence of two hungry lions during the construction of a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya in 1894, according to the story of British Colonel J.H. Patterson (played by Val Kilmer). According to Patterson's novel and the film, 130 Indian and African workers were mauled in a few months by the two huge specimens. The official story reports half of them. Behind the action and suspense, with which the film is imbued, appears the eternal struggle of man against nature. Despite two Oscar nominations and the performance of Michael Douglas as the hunter Remington, "Ghost in The Darkness" is not a completely successful work, but it is still to be seen because it tells a true story, indeed one of the most famous stories of colonial Kenya. In fact, after inspections and writing the screenplay based on Kenyan locations, the film was actually shot in South Africa due to the high taxes imposed by Kenya. It was transported by Masai extras.

4.    SOMETHING THAT VALUES

Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, two of the most important actors of the post-war period, are the protagonists of the 1957 film based on Robert C. Ruark's novel of the same name, which tells the beginning of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. Shot by the great director and screenwriter Peter Brooks, between Nairobi and Nanyuki, the film produced by Metro Goldwin Mayer tells the story of the friendship between a boy, son of white settlers, played by Hudson, and his childhood friend and playmate Kimani, for whom Sidney Poitier also had to deal with the racism of certain British circles in Nairobi during filming.
For the first time in film history, Kikuyu traditions are also filmed live in the villages on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Also for this reason "Something of value" is a film to see.

5.    I DREAMED OF AFRICA

The American film taken from the autobiography of the Venetian conservationist Kuki Gallman, which has more or less the same title ("I dreamt of Africa") for those who read the book, faithfully retraces the stages of a woman's troubled life. The producers, entrusting a director like the Englishman Hugh Hudson ("Greystoke, the legend of Tarzan") aimed to repeat the success of "My Africa", but the story is less epic and Kim Basinger is not Meryl Streep. All in all, impossible comparisons aside, it's a film to see especially because there are magic scenes in the Laikipia plateau where Nature takes the scene. Gallman's love for Africa and her battles to protect it (as you will see in the continuation of her existence) are a good reason to know her story also through the big screen.

6.    WHITE MISCHIEF

Another true story, or rather, a fact of crime still unresolved in colonial Kenya.
The environment is that of the aristocratic lobby called the "Happy Valley", in which the sons of good families, sons of diplomats, artists, adventurers and women of many vices and virtues converge.
The murder of a young man who had spent the night with the wife of the noble Lord Erroll, a prominent British expat in Nairobi, inevitably falls on the eccentric man, played by Charles Dance, gives the cue to the good director Michael Radford (who among others, in his career, he directed Massimo Troisi in "The Postman") to paint a picture of the British bourgeoisie's lasciviousness and decandence in Kenya among dance parties, good living rooms and hunting safaris, in which the figure of Diana Broughton (the icy Greta Scacchi) stands out. In the background, a Nairobi relocated very well, perhaps even too well. The end is well known, to those who know a bit of Kenyan history or have read James Fox's book "White Mischief": Lord Erroll, acquitted of murder charges, will be found suicidal a few months later, for what is considered another mystery that has never been completely shed light on.

7.    IN THE BLACK CONTINENT

With the exception of other Italian films in which Kenya was only a pretext to portray a generic Africa or those in which it is the background without a story representing it, Marco Risi's film with Diego Abatantuono is certainly the most important Italian film shot in Kenya. Telling the story of an imaginary Italian, Fulvio Colombo, whose portrait recalls that of some of his compatriots living in Malindi at the time, Risi offers a glimpse of the Italian colony on the shores of the Indian Ocean when there was still no extradition, among corrupt police, schemers and people who, despite the African wonder, ended up re-proposing in a virgin and distant land, a system for which our country and our compatriots are often criticized. In the role of the naive son of a missing Italian who will open the skeletons of the tricolor wardrobe in Kenya, the actor and director Corso Salani and in the role of his girlfriend a young and provocative Anna Falchi. 

8.    WHITE MASAI

This film is also based on a true story and inaugurated a certain sentimental literature based on relationships (often failed, always tormented) between Western and Kenyan partners. In this case, the beautiful and talented German actress Nina Hoss plays the part of the author, the Swiss Corinne Hoffman (in the film she is called Carola) who, after a holiday with her boyfriend, falls in love with the Masai and decides to stay in Kenya.
The plunge into a completely different society, into traditions that the girl marries enthusiastically, until marriage. The classic dream of African love in ethnic sauce, but it doesn't end well, because social and cultural differences will eventually come out and condition the future. The birth of a little girl will be the classic drop that will overflow the African vase. The "Masai Bianca" will return to Switzerland with her daughter and the Masai will remain in her homeland, painted in this film shot in a slightly television style but with suggestive settings in the Mara.

9.    NOWHERE IN AFRICA

Definitely the most important German film shot partly in Kenya. It is no coincidence that the film (original title Nirgendwo in Africa) based on the novel of the same name, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2003. It is the story of a Jewish family who, at the beginning of racial segregation in Germany, moved to Kenya in 1937. The film tells a human story in which Africa brings out contradictions and moods made even more inescapable by the outbreak of World War II. The head of the family, the Jewish lawyer Walter Redlich, is an idealist and sees the Kenyan people as persecuted as his own, while his wife reveals a veiled racism. The new life in the Rift Valley, bucolic but hopeless, is intertwined with the story of the British taking power over non-allied Europeans and taking them prisoner. This, however, does not happen for the Jews, considered victims of the Germans. The story is shot and told very well, with the performance of the actress Julian Kohler standing out. An unknown cinematographic jewel whose version dubbed in Italian is not easy to find.

10.    SAFARI

This 1956 film is one of the first dramons to tell the story of colonial Africa rebelling. It was directed by Terence Young, who later became famous as the director of the first James Bond films. The beginning of the Mau Mau revolt is the backdrop to a story that weaves the thirst for revenge of an American hunter whose son is killed during a raid while he is out for a joke.
The search for the perpetrator of the murder, a former employee of the hunter, leads the man to Nairobi and alcoholism, but in the meantime, his work is not yet finished.