The images that appear on my laptop screen are of Toby Schmutzler and Milcah Cherotich, two of the persons behind Nawi, Kenya’s Oscars 2025 submission. They are exactly on time. But there’s someone missing, I think. Where is Michelle Lemuya Ikeny, the young actress who lights up the screen in their film?
“She’s sleeping,” says Schmutzler, whose brother, Kevin, is also absent.
They are speaking to me from the US. I am in Lagos. It’s probably too punishing a time difference for the young actress who stars as the titular character in a story about a girl married off to an older suitor. Her father says that’s the tradition but he is also trying to use his daughter’s bride price to pay off a debt. What inspired the story? Cherotich, who is credited with the story, responds.
“The idea was to bring attention to the challenge of child marriage that is very common in Kenya and especially in the rural areas,” she says, adding that one of her sisters was a victim and she had a friend who was abducted in her presence for the purpose.
“Over time, I wondered, how should I raise the issue of child marriage? How should I make people aware of child marriage? The topic is very complex and nobody wants to talk about it. But I felt that I need to speak for millions of girls who don’t have a voice.”
The chance to give voice to the subject finally came, but perhaps through an unlikely source. Years before, the Schmutzler brothers, who were already into social impact filmmaking, had been approached by Learning Lions, an NGO based in Kenya, but without the right story, nothing happened. “As white Europeans, we couldn’t find an authentic story,” Schmutzler says. Finally, the NGO decided to launch a short story competition. Cherotich won the contest and together with Kevin and Toby, a screenplay was written.
To direct it, the brothers needed help. “As you can see, I don’t have the right cultural background,” Toby says. They decided to bring two women on board. On set, Vallentine Chelluget was responsible for Swahili dialogue coaching and worked directly with the young actors. Apuu Mourine was more involved with the cultural elements and she also talked to the elders of Turkana, the region in which the film is set.
For the lead role, they insisted on getting someone who wasn’t a professional from Kenya’s urban capital Nairobi. This meant they had to go from school to school asking kids to say a sentence from the film. Apparently, Ikeny stood out from the start. She was selected, coached for a couple weeks, then ferried to the set.
For now, the film doesn’t have a distributor, but getting selected as Kenya’s Oscars submission has brought it attention from far and wide. Europe and the U.S. have come calling. Still, they would like the country that birthed the story to see it. This, Toby says, would mean a streamer accessible to viewers in Kenya. There’s also “an outreach idea from the NGO. They want to take it to the villages in Turkana because it is important these men see it and maybe it would change their understanding of the problem. The NGO has also set up something called the Nawi Initiative, which is building girls’ boarding schools in Turkana.”
The first school has been built and is called the Wakanda Girls High School. “Disney is going to be mad with them at some point,” Toby laughs.
Cherotich hopes that Nawi “can reach our own political leaders back at home so that they can craft policies that support ending child marriage. I’m also hopeful the creative industry, especially in Kenya and in Africa at large, can come up with programmes that also support creatives who are talking about social injustice. So that writers can step up and be bold enough to write about issues that are very critical—not to sit back or just bring out fancy things about Africa.
“We have people suffering in silence and it is our duty to bring this to light. I also hope the perpetrators, those people still going on with the practice of child marriage, can have a bit of compassion and change their mind. They need to know that what they are doing is harming the lives of others.”
Cherotich’s passion is quite obvious as she speaks, perhaps because of the personal stakes. As she tells me, Nawi is “depicting my sister,” but she insists that Nawi’s experience isn’t her sister’s. Toby says they borrowed from real life. But where is the sister today? Cherotich pauses before answering.
“She is paying the price of child marriage. Even if we feel like the effects of child marriage is short term it is not.” She explains that her sister has anger issues and can be quite needlessly suspicious. As a teen, Cherotich remembers receiving “a very bad beating” from this sister because she had seen her walking with a male friend.
“For her it was triggering,” she says, adding that even the man who had married her sister was forced by tradition to do so. The way she explains it, everybody loses when a child is forced into marriage.
I ask if there’s a possibility of more happening between the brothers from Germany and the talents now cultivated in Turkana? Toby says the goal was to make his and his brother’s presence superfluous.
“The cool thing is there is a network built between Nairobi where the film industry is and this very remote part of the country where all these talented people are. I wouldn’t say we won’t go back to Kenya. But the best thing would be if no one needs us to bring out a story.”
