In Amsterdam, where The Shadow Scholars has screened at the ongoing IDFA, the filmmaker Eloise King comes to our interview immediately after introducing her film to an audience at the Carre, an upscale theatre in the centre of the city. She is with Patricia Kingori, the professor whose research into a community of Kenyans writing academic essays for students in the west forms the basis of the new documentary. I am aware that the director would likely not be around until the end of the festival. She and her star academic subject will have a meeting after we speak. In other words, these are very busy women.
The interview with King below has been lightly edited.
How did you happen on this story?
“It started with a conversation with Patricia. We were talking about her work. At the time, she’d been working on a project about fakes, forgeries, misinformation. So one of the things that really got my attention is that she essentially said that she’d been to a talk where they said they thought 40000 people in Kenya were writing and the writing work they were doing was for other people in the Global North. They had sort of described it as fake. For me, the first question was: how do real people write fake essays? Secondly, I thought I needed to understand more about it. It was fascinating.”
In the documentary, you include bits of Kingori’s life. Was that always the plan?
“It evolved over time. When we began filming at the very beginning, it was all focused on the writers. The focus expanded during the Covid ban and Patricia got the honour of being awarded the youngest black professor at Oxford. And it felt to me that, at least that would give us confidence in saying, this person really is an expert in what they’re doing. She is also intrinsically connected to this story in terms of her own heritage. We have known each other for a long time and there was a real comfort in saying: why don’t we explore this together? Why don’t we look at this as a relationship between you, the writers and then education as a whole?”
The Shadow Scholars shows the invisible writers (even if their faces are obscured) back in Kenya and not the ordinarily visible students in the west. Was this reversal a conscious decision?
“I think it was a really conscious decision from two aspects. Firstly, I think often there just isn’t enough space…how do we make space for the people who aren’t often seen and aren’t brought into screens and given visibility? I think Alice Diop calls it cinema of reparations. How do we allow an opportunity to bring marginalised groups into our films and allow them to have the agency and be the drivers of a narrative? I always really wanted the writers at the center of the story.”
“One of the real questions that we had ideologically was: who is really in the shadows? The students that we feature only in voice represent millions of people who are handing in work they haven’t written themselves. Their clients don’t know who they are when they eventually get into the labor force. So, I think in some ways what I wanted to do is really underlie that aspect of the story. Also, there’s an ominous sense in having people surround us who we don’t know don’t have the qualifications to be doing what they do.”
How did you approach shooting the scenes in Kenya?
“One of the things I really wanted was a sense of intimacy and closeness, and so you’ll notice that even though we’ve ended up having to use AI to cover their faces, we’re often, quite close. We are in their homes. You’re quite close to seeing emotions across their faces. I really wanted scenes that we had to show the Kenya that I was seeing. The country has got an amazing sort of texture of light, hasn’t it?”
As you said, the film uses AI as a disguise for the writers. Was that the plan from the start?
“It was a really difficult decision. It actually wasn’t until really late in our process that it was decided. Three years into filming, two days before our last shoot, we had a conversation about the ethics of how we were showing them the duty of care and the legalities around it. What happened and emerged over time was that there were crackdowns in Australia and then in the UK. By 2023, it was a really different context. Writing academic essays for other people was banned from those countries, which added a potential for criminal prosecution.”
“We believe that they deserve us to be seen and for the world to understand these incredibly intelligent people. We had a conversation with our legal experts again and at this point, they said, actually we think that some of the risks of repercussions have become a little bit higher and that this is something that we need to take really seriously. That was the point that we decided that we were going to not identify them.”
“However, we had shot the entire film. I went back and totally rewrote the film that also meant kind of an adjustment in terms of how much screen time people could have. How much other aspects of their lives were shown because we had to take really seriously what identification could mean. What we finally did was inspired by Welcome to Chechnya.”
Is there a part of the moral blame that could go to the Kenyans writing these essays?
“The benefit and the pass grade or fail can only go to the student. And so, the implication of the relationship only falls on the student, so it’s difficult to engage that third party in the moralising when they don’t stand to gain or lose.”
But they get cash, right?
“Yes. But Ngugi wa Thiong’o [interviewed in the film] gives this example of the way in which there has been a sort of historic extraction of ideas and labor [by the global north]. It is something that’s gone on for a really long time.”
Final question. What’s next for you?
“I would like to make sure that any acknowledgement for the film may directly benefit the writers, so we’re really open to any opportunities to enable pipelines or pathway discussions.”
How will that work?
“It would be amazing to see whether or not institutions want to discuss whether there would be opportunities for people in Kenya who are obviously incredibly capable. I think that would definitely be welcome and exciting. What the film does is disprove any kind of superiority or supremacy of Global North academic institutions and the values they hold. What these writers have shown is that they have the entrepreneurial instincts to be able to liberate themselves financially and from the shadow of being a people who are inherently reliant on others to lead them. They have shown themselves incredibly capable of thought leadership.”
