Tapi! A New Film presented by the Nest premieres at IFFR 2020

We’re excited to share our first film release of 2020! We’ve been part of a really special project with the wonderful people at the International Film Festival Rotterdam: they asked us, alongside 2 other African collectives, to make films to be presented at the festival. These 3 works would be part of a total of 14, in their Pro Harvest docket. The other 2 African collectives are Geração 80 (Angola) and Kriolscope (Cape Verde).

Starring Vitalis Waweru, Neville Misati, Isaya Evans, Derrick Wambugu and Brian Njonge, Tapi! echoes our recent exploration of African and black spiritualities individually and in other work. We asked ourselves about the erasure of indigenous ways of believing. We wanted to think critically about the roles race and colonial histories play in what and how we believe now. We wanted to be honest about the layers in which we can believe seemingly contradictory things at the same time. We wanted to recognise the shifts in the zeitgeist, which more and more reflect that marginalised people all over the world are finding paths to comfort which involve the stars, the ancestors, and the metaphysical in diverse ways, shifting towards ways of being spiritual that acknowledge identities more individually, and the inherent wider queerness in this approach.

“Tapi!” is about a formative moment in the life of a young ritual healer, Jackson, one of the last surviving practitioners of a fictional healing ritual, “utapishi”. He faces off with local church movements who are determined to erase this practice one and for all, alongside its complex history and context.

We’re really grateful to Peter van Hoof (IFFR), Tessa Boerman, our incredible cast and crew, Jorge Cohen of Geração 80 for his encouragement, and everyone else who made this film possible!