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Der Kampf um den Heiligen Baum

The Battle of the Sacred Tree
Wanjiru Kinyanjui, Germany 1995, 82 Min., English, Swahili with English subtitles

Followed by a talk with Wanjiru Kinyanjui. Introduction and moderation by Karina Griffith.

Watching Wanjiru Kinyanjui's Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum (The Battle of the Sacred Tree), you would never guess that this witty and assured feature was the director’s DFFB graduation project. Shot far from Berlin, on location in a Kenyan village with local actors, the film’s dialogue alternates between English and Kiswahili, with a soundtrack by the Senegalese musician Mamadou Mbaye. Based on a short story by the best-selling author Barbara Kimenye,the film follows Mumbi (Margaret Nyache), a young woman who leaves Nairobi and her abusive husband to return to her ancestral village. There she soon clashes with a Christian women's group, whose members are determined to eradicate every last trace of pre-colonial beliefs. They are particularly vexed by a magnificent tree, because the villagers believe it possesses supernatural powers. A cunning mayor and an amorous tailor leap to Mumbi's defense, but in the end it is ants that engineer what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the doyen of Kenyan literature, once referred to as "Decolonising the Mind". (KG)

Wanjiru Kinyanjui studied film at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (DFFB)  and produced film programming for children at ZDF. After nearly two decades in Germany, she returned to Kenya where she chaired the Kenya International Film Festival and founded the Udada (Sisterhood) Film Festival in Nairobi, Kenya. She is a film lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya and is one of the 2025 DAAD film fellows in Berlin. 

Karina Griffith is Guest Professor of Intersectional Visual and Media Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)). Her artistic research concentrates on questions of projection,  archives and conditions of spectatorship. She is part of the curatorial team of the Berlinale Film Festival section Forum Expanded and recently completed her dissertation, Flânoirie: The Moving Images of Black German Cinemas at the University of Toronto, Canada.