The Power of Truth: Kiana Rawji’s Journey in Authentic Filmmaking

Kiana Rawji is an award-winning South Asian filmmaker born in Canada, though her family history is deeply rooted in East Africa, particularly Kenya. She has produced, directed, and written films screened across the US, Canada, and East Africa. In this interview with KBC Digital, she discusses how her upbringing influenced her storytelling approach, particularly regarding sensitive topics, with empathy and respect.

You were raised in Canada, but your roots are in East Africa. How, would you say, has your cultural heritage shaped your identity and your work as a filmmaker?

My intersecting identities as a South Asian Muslim woman, a daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and a first-generation Canadian definitely fuel the stories I strive to tell as a filmmaker. My identity and heritage have naturally drawn me toward stories of diaspora and displacement, love and loss, home and human resilience. I’m interested in stories of people searching for identity, belonging, and grappling with questions I have also been navigating. Growing up with tenuous but tangible ties to East Africa, Canada, and India has made me embrace multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction, as those elements are inherent in my understanding of who I am and where I’m from.

I’ve learned through experience that people, places, and stories can be many things all at once. I don’t like to tie up my stories too neatly; I’m more interested in embracing messiness, leaning into ambiguity, and illustrating the multifaceted nature of people, issues, and relationships through my films.

Speaking of your multifaceted heritage, what aspects of your South Asian and East African background do you feel most connected to?

Kenya has always held a special place in my heart, as it was my parents’ and grandparents’ birthplace, and I grew up visiting often. My family goes back three generations in East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania). Before that, our family history traces back to India, and in Canada, my household was infused with both South Asian and Kenyan cultural elements. I ate Kenyan-Indian food at home, and my parents and grandparents spoke an East-Africanized version of Gujarati, an Indian language.

So even in Canada, I felt this connection to my heritage through food, language, and culture. Much of our culture as a diaspora (the South Asian diaspora in East Africa) was intertwined with and baked into Kenyan culture. For instance, things like chapati and chai came from South Asian influence but have become so integrated into Kenyan food culture that people think of them as native staples and don’t even remember their origins anymore.

Is language a big part of the Kenyan culture you connect to?

It’s funny because the Swahili my parents and grandparents spoke was a kind of “kitchen Swahili” or broken Swahili. I now speak Swahili better than them because I learned it at Harvard and have used it in my films in Kenya. I remember the first Swahili word I learned was mwananchi, as I traveled to Kenya with my mother as a child and heard her bargain at markets. The locals would call her a mzungu, and she’d insist she was a mwananchi and wanted the “mwananchi price.” We joked in our family that she should carry her Kenyan passport around or wear a T-shirt that said “mwananchi.”

There’s so much love and nostalgia in the way my family talks about their lives in East Africa. I grew up hearing stories about the smell of Kenyan soil, drinking masala chai on the verandah, and licking greasy fingers after eating fresh bhajia at Diamond Plaza.

I believe you go into a bit of your family history in your films.

I’ve wanted to make a film based on my family’s history, which led me to my film Inside Job. The film allowed me to vividly imagine my family’s history and what their everyday lives were like in 70s/80s East Africa more deeply and richly than I had before. It’s often hard to claim either cultural identity—Kenyan or South Asian—as my “own” or claim that I “belong” to either, but both are part of my family’s history and run in my blood, influencing how I move through the world and the kinds of stories I want to tell.

How do you balance the narrative between local authenticity and your perspective as someone who was raised outside the region?

With each film I’ve made in Kenya, I ensured they were deeply informed by locals who knew more than I did, believing strongly in the power of collaboration and relationships. Inside Job was based, as I mentioned, on original interviews—with both East African Asian employers and black East African domestic workers—who currently live or have lived in the region and lived through the history I was trying to depict on screen.

My entire script was informed by these interviews and lived experiences; almost every detail and line of dialogue can be traced back to something real I learned from people’s real stories and lives. When putting together my production team, it was important to assemble an entirely local cast and crew, which I did. They were incredible to work with, especially since the film moves fluidly between languages—English, Swahili, and Gujarati. I sought out local actors who spoke these languages fluently and natively so they could improvise freely, infusing the story with their authentic touch.

Does this method also apply to Mama of Manyatta?

With Mama Of Manyatta, my documentary in Kisumu, it was crucial for me to spend time with the community there and engage with them before, during, and after picking up my camera. With any documentary, especially character-based ones, you must spend time with and truly care about the people whose stories you depict and build trust. I don’t intend to be a filmmaker who lives entirely behind her lens, observing, recording, and then leaving without a trace.

I aim to engage directly with people, embracing precious moments not mediated by a camera lens and immersing myself in the lives of others—whether through dancing, laughing, sharing meals, or conversations—to understand others better and portray their lives authentically. Overall, I aim to use rigorous research, genuine engagement, and collaboration to fill my own blind spots when engaging with stories I feel connected to but have not directly lived through. At the same time, I think my outsider perspective can be an advantage and offer a unique point of view.

Did your personal family history inform this exploration and disentanglement, and what did you discover in the process?

Yes, my family history was a significant part of my exploration. I interviewed many family members and friends during my research. I was surprised to find a range of dynamics and perspectives. Some South Asian employers denied ever seeing or treating their workers as anything other than “family,” unwilling to admit that intimacy and exploitation could coexist, while others were overcome with guilt and shame as they confessed to me the inhumane ways they treated their domestic workers in the 60s-80s.

I was surprised to see that some racialized stereotypes and generalizations still existed, but also surprised to see that some people had managed to transcend barriers in some ways. For example, the end of Inside Job is directly inspired by a family member of mine whose parents left all their belongings, properties, businesses, etc., to their domestic workers when they were forced to leave Uganda. There were stories of people going back to East Africa (most of my family left in the 70s during the wave of South Asians fleeing the region) and now being able to share meals with black Africans as equals, something that never would have happened in the 70s.

There were both shocking instances of enduring racism and hope for a more egalitarian future.

These are complex social issues that both films examine. What prompted you to focus on such issues?

In my first year at Harvard, I took a class called Social Justice and The Documentary Film. I was drawn to the potential of film to shape culture, illuminate social justice issues, and reckon with hard truths. It was after that class that I became a filmmaker. From the beginning of my film journey, I was drawn to its power to engage with pressing and complex issues. With Mama, I was already interested in women and gender, caregiving, and poverty.

Mama Phelgone, the subject of the film, acted as a caregiver for many people and built a community of care around her. My mother has done a lot of global development work in healthcare, and from a young age, she infused in me a passion for international development and poverty alleviation; when I was in high school, I started a girls’ entrepreneurship development program in an impoverished school in Kangemi and a girls’ school in Zanzibar.

I was drawn to Phelgone after learning about the immense impact she had in her community and the urgency of the issues she helped people deal with. I remember visiting Manyatta and learning that 1 in 3 girls there were HIV positive; I was shocked. In the US and Canada, many people don’t understand how prevalent HIV/AIDS still is and how closely intertwined it is with gender-based violence. Many in the West think HIV/AIDS is a problem of the past, so I thought it was imperative to highlight that this is still an issue and we need to pay attention to it.

With Inside Job, I wanted to make a film about my family history and, having been raised in a multicultural society, I was shocked to learn of the deep-seated racial resentments, fear, and even hatred that existed (and still exist) in postcolonial East Africa when my parents were growing up. I’ve long been passionate about pluralism, a cosmopolitan ethic, and engaging with people across all kinds of differences—racial, cultural, religious, etc.—because these are values I was raised with, especially as an