GOAT

Kenya is a country where Christianity and Islam have been accepted as the nation's primary spiritual truth, but I find myself wondering about our spiritual beliefs before colonialism. Goat emerged from this questioning - my first truly personal film in over a decade, made after 13 years of building a remarkable film fund and community for independent African filmmakers, while my own creative voice lay dormant.
This desire to reclaim my voice led me home, both literally and spiritually. Goat follows Suki, a young woman called back to Kenya for love after years away, returning as a stranger to her own culture - something I could relate to after living in the United Kingdom as a student for nearly a decade. As a teenager in England, my classmates kept asking me deep cultural questions that I struggled to answer, seemingly unaware that their country had stripped mine of so many cultural nuances, creating an educational system where English ways were deemed more important than our own.
This personal displacement mirrors a broader cultural rupture. Why did my great-grandmother rip off her traditional jewelry and throw them down a pit-latrine in the late 1920s? Why were my grandfather's traditionally pierced ears sewn back up? Who were those women who visited my grandmother dressed in skins and beads and sniffing tobacco from pouches round their necks - and why did she not dress like them? What did this rejection of culture, and therefore self, do to my parents' generation, caught between this new Christian world and century-old traditions? These family questions became the foundation for Goat - my vehicle to explore what we leave behind when we rush forward into a colonially crafted present.
The film poses urgent questions that extend beyond my family's story. Why do we, who aren't drawn to Christianity, readily embrace Buddhism and New Age spirituality without pausing to first examine our own cultural and spiritual roots? What happens when we treat our own ancestral wisdom as backwards? And what if past ancestral actions carry present-day consequences that we're too ignorant of to even think of guarding against?
Goat suggests that some forces cannot be dismissed simply because we've decided not to believe in them. The horror comes not from external monsters, but from the realization that in rejecting our past, we may have rejected essential parts of ourselves. The film argues that the spiritualism and ancestral wisdom Africans embraced for centuries still matters, still walks in the shadows with us today - whether we acknowledge it or not.
But this isn't just a homecoming story about cultural reclamation: It's also a film about love. If you finally decided your childhood sweetheart was the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, how far would you follow them? This secondary question drives the film's emotional core, grounding the spiritual exploration in human connection and sacrifice.
After 13 years of helping others tell their stories, I've missed telling mine. Goat is me reconnecting with my voice as I explore themes I hope to develop more fully in a feature film. It represents not just a return to personal filmmaking, but a reckoning with spiritual and cultural questions that have been waiting patiently for me to be brave enough to ask them.