What a life-affirming joy to watch and listen to the inspiring creative force of nature that is Kenyan filmmaker Judy Kibinge, in Lindiwe Dovey’s documentary, Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge. Given the huge challenges that African filmmakers face—creatively, technically, financially, politically, and ideologically—Kibinge’s career is certainly worth celebrating and documenting.

Nairobi, the capital of Kenya where Kibinge is based, is an astonishing filmmaking hub because of the large number of high profile and increasingly internationally celebrated female filmmakers who work there. The international dimension of this film industry is of less significance though, as the most illuminating aspect of this documentary is revealing to the viewer what is possible when filmmakers take the tools of storytelling entirely into their own hands. This is particularly pertinent in the East African context, where home-grown, indigenous filmmaking has long been hampered by the legacy of British colonialism, which treated film as an instructional tool, a colonial hangover that contributed to the prevalence of NGO-funded, creatively limiting didactic documentary-making. The region has also often been exploited by foreign filmmaking, including in European or North American films that use the African environment as a backdrop for white stories, or in nature documentaries fetishizing the stunning natural landscapes. The film was produced as part of Dovey’s large-scale five-year European Research Council-funded project entitled “African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies.” Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge depicts decolonization in action.

Kibinge is an engaging and whip-smart creative subject for a documentary. She invites Dovey into her life with candor and generosity, sharing details of her professional journey—which started in a high-flying corporate advertising environment—and even glimpses of her private life as we meet her husband, Joshua (who also works with/for her), young son, Elliot (who describes his mother’s achievements as “so crazy”), and her parents, who relate how she didn’t crawl or walk as a toddler, but rolled: “the rolling one.” Kibinge is multi-talented; in addition to her advertising and filmmaking career, she is a founding member of the African literary magazine Kwani? and the founder of Docubox, an East African documentary film fund described in the documentary as a home for independent filmmakers, an initiative to build networks, friendships, trust, and skills. Other subjects in the documentary rightly describe her as a trailblazer. Dovey interviews many colleagues, family, friends, and aspiring—as well as established—filmmakers who have crossed paths with Kibinge, interspersed with ample clips from Kenyan films directed by Kibinge and her protégés, bringing to life the full spectrum of the diverse and important stories that these filmmakers want to tell.

Kibinge’s debut feature film, Dangerous Affair (2002), “blew up the local scene” and ushered in a new wave of Kenyan filmmaking because of its love story that centralizes female characters, and its setting in a vibrant, modern Nairobi that appealed to young Kenyan urbanites. Kibinge relates an exasperating encounter with a European journalist at the Zanzibar International Film Festival—where the film won the main festival prize, the Golden Dhow—who confronted her with why she has made such a “Western” film. Kibinge states that she wanted to break away from the European way of telling African stories, and to show that African stories do not always have to be on “heavy” topics. That is not to suggest that Kibinge has not tackled serious and political subjects in her films: the short Coming of Age (2007) considers Kenya’s journey to democracy through the eyes of a child; Something Necessary (2013) is a fiction feature about postconflict reconciliation after the 2008 election violence; in Scarred: Anatomy of a Massacre (2013), she interviews survivors of the Wagalla massacre where government troops were ordered to stop ethnic violence by detaining and then killing 5,000 locals at an airstrip in 1984. The film gave a voice to the voiceless and actually changed government perception of the event. This is filmmaking with real impact.

Through the range of filmmakers we meet, we get a true sense of the intersectionality and creativity that exist in this film industry. We meet Philippa Ndisi-Hermann, whose deeply personal, meditative documentary New Moon (2008), shot on the Muslim island of Lamu, was one of Docubox’s first productions. Peter Murimi, director, and Toni Kamau, producer, speak about the importance of leaving a record for future generations through their film I Am Samuel (2020), about the struggles but also joys of a gay Kenyan man. Maia Lekow and Christoper King’s The Letter (2019) is about the devastating effects of witchcraft accusations on communities, told through a personal story.

Out of the Box is expertly shot and edited by Dovey and her mostly Kenyan crew, and it mixes the personal, political, and professional in an engaging and relatable way. As a window onto a screen world that many cinephiles elsewhere might know very little of, it reminds us that there are worlds of creativity out there that audiences in the Global North are not always aware of. As a film about filmmaking, it lets the audience see glimpses of the magic that goes on behind the scenes and screens. As a representation of African creativity, it is a document of true emancipation and decoloniality.