Film Review: Wanuri Kahiu’s “Pumzi"

A thought-provoking short story

I just watched Pumzi, a sci-fi that makes you think about the environment and what we are doing to preserve it before it is too late.

It has been predicted that one day water will be such a scarce resource wars will be waged over it. Pumzi takes place 35 years after World War 3, known as “the Water War". There is no tree left on Earth. All that remains is desert.

The action takes place in a futuristic structure where lives survivors. Life there is full of order and control. Everything is closely monitored. Your urine is purified into drinking water.

The main character is a woman who has a bad habit of dreaming about a tree. This is treated as an illness and she has to take dream-suppressing drugs.

She works at a lab and on this day she has been sent a soil sample from an unknown source. On examining it, she realizes it has water content and it is not radioactive. Her superiors order her to get rid of it, but she is adamant.

She illegally leaves the facility with a small plant she has started to grow and heads out in search of the soil sample’s source.

We hope this is how her dream comes true. That she will plant the seedling and it will become a majestic tree.

It’s a story about hope and those who have it, those who water it tirelessly, those who do not give up, those who do not listen to the voices that would drown it out, those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

The abrupt ending informs me that this is a short story adapted into a movie. Wanuri Kahiu could have written and published this as a short story and it would have won prizes; she made a movie instead and it won awards.
The story is excellent, the visuals magical — as magical as a cold, soulless sci-fi world can be. There is a look to this world and its objects that gives you a sense of animation, like how Osborne Macharia’s photography has a hyperreal effect. Arresting beauty. And I suspect the dream shot of her reaching out to the tree inspired Black Panther’s dream scene of T’challa with his dead father under a tree. If not, it did remind me of it anyway. Both films are in the afrofuturism genre.