AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange

- Where am I?

- This is Kati Kati, and you are here because you're dead.

- [Mbithi Masya] "Kati Kati" is a story of an amnesiac who wakes up in the afterlife and finds herself stuck with a few other people in this wilderness lodge, trying to figure out why she's there, trying to see if she can remember who she was, and also just kinda learning why everyone else is there.

- It would be much easier if you don't question everything.

- [Masya] The story came from a place of grief.

At the time, I had lost a very close friend.

The film came from one moment, during one of the wake meetings, someone said, "Oh, she's now in a better place.

She's left all these things behind."

And the question that I posed to myself was, is death really that release, or what if you were forced to deal with your baggage before moving on to the next stage in life?

It kind of felt like the most expensive therapy session I could ever have imagined having.

(laughing) - [Speaker] So these transitions, do they happen often?

- Most of us have seen it, what, three times?

- [Masya] This film was one of the places that I had to put that grief.

I had to move it somewhere just to put her spirit's energy somewhere and also just kind of process a lot of things.

- No one stays here forever.

- But how do we leave if we don't know what brought us here in the first place?

- [Masya] 'Cause it wasn't just the grief that came from the story.

I was also using it as a chance to reflect on a few things about Kenyan society and community that I don't like.

We are a very shame-based society in many ways.

A lot of the historical injustices are never reckoned with in Kenya.

We just forget and move on.

So this film just gave me a perfect place to take some of these bigger thoughts and kind of crystallize them into personal stories.

(thunder booms) - Who's missing?

- I don't know, man.

- [Masya] Our stories have started getting seen internationally, respected, and in a way that, for lack of a better way to describe it, it doesn't feel voyeuristic.

With foreign cinema, sometimes people like the idea of peeping into another society, another culture, and just going away.

But it's these universal human themes that are starting to come across in all the materials.