ENCHUKUNOTO (The Return) directed by Laissa Malih, and the cinematographer Franklyn Mudulia, just won "People’s Choice Award" for the "Best Short Documentary" at the Maoriland International Film Festival.
Quote from Laisa Malih :
"History in the making!Setting a path and pace for other generations to come!Indigenous Stories Matter !To indigenous storytelling Sovereignty ✊🏾"
•1st female Maasai filmmaker in my community
•1st Kenyan filmmaker to attend Māoriland International Film Festival
•1st Maasai youth to attend Māoriland International Film Festival
•1st indigenous filmmaker from Kenya to attend Māoriland International Film Festival
•1st indigenous Maasai /kenyan filmmaker to win an award at the Māoriland International Film Festival 2024
Laissa and Franklyne at the Maoriland Film Festival for Native Peoples in New Zealand, 20-24 March 2024.
SYNOPSIS "ENCHUKUNOTO"
As the first female Maasai filmmaker, Laissa Malih initially set out to document the land-based practices of her forefathers and ways in which climate change is reshaping Maasai communities.
In returning to the IL-Laikipiak Maasai village that her parents left when she was a child, Malih experiences an epiphany: her own life is a reflection of the myriad challenges between Maasai youth and elders, women and men, ancestral ways of passing down essential knowledge and modern methods of education.
In Enchukunoto, Malih’s singular vantage also challenges ways in which the Maasai peoples have long been seen and documented by tourists and other outsiders. “Many tourists come to our Maa lands to film the lions, the gazelles,” she observes. “The camera takes and takes. I wonder what my camera can give my people in return?”
Interweaving verité with Malih’s epiphanies, Malih offers a heretofore unseen perspective as an insider and an outsider, a woman among men, a filmmaker carrying on sacred Maasai traditions of storytelling in an era defined by uncertainty.