JOMO

Its theatre run was shut down by the government of then President Jomo Kenyatta and Ngũgĩ was locked up in a maximum security jail for a year without trial.

I think the breakthroughs that come when working with someone like Jomo is figuring out how that feels, because there’s a difference between knowing where the camera should go and where to look and how it should feel when the camera’s moving, or how the camera should deal with depth of field in relationship to the range of equipment that we can have and how to produce a scene.

And so a lot of it was about touch with Jomo and the shot-listing and actually dealing with the spaces itself.

But how do you have, as Jomo would say, as little amount of artifice as possible?

Olsen: And then what was it like in explaining this to your actors, to Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson because, you can tell me I’m misunderstanding this, but there are scenes in which they’re in that scene, but they’re physically maybe not present on set in that moment, where Jomo was operating the camera, you sometimes are operating the camera.