Judy Kibinge

Judy Kibinge (born 1967) is a Kenyan filmmaker, writer and producer. She has produced, written and directed a number of films, best known are Something Necessary (2013), Dangerous Affair (2002), and Project Daddy (2004). She is also known for establishing Docubox, a documentary film fund for African filmmakers to help them produce and distribute their film. She released her first film, The Aftermath, in 2002 and critics have said that she uses her films to impart stories about Kenya, particularly those about women and others that are typically not told in mainstream Hollywood. Kibinge has been described as a trailblazer for other female Kenyan filmmakers by scholar Clara Giruzzi, to which she has stated that she is just one of the many women who are at the forefront of the rebirth of film in Kenya. She has directed both fiction and non-fiction and Kibinge has been commissioned to make various documentaries, specifically corporate documentaries. In 2023 Lindiwe Dovey directed a documentary film, Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge, to document the work and impact of Kibinge in the film industry. Kibinge was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1967. Her family moved to Washington DC in America in 1969 when she was two. Her family stayed in the US for five years. At the age of 7, she won a children's writing competition in America. She attended The Kenya High School before she moved to UK for her post-secondary education.Kibinge moved to the United Kingdom after growing up in the United States. For post-secondary education, she attended Malvern Girls College, after which she attended art college in Birmingham. She moved to Manchester, where she attended Manchester Polytechnic and graduated with a Design for Communication Media degree; she never attended a film school. Before becoming a filmmaker, Kibinge worked in the advertising industry. In 1999 she left the advertising industry to pursue a filmmaking career and began directing commercial documentaries about Monsanto. Her films are known as depicting social taboos, violence in developing countries, and romantic comedy. Her film Something Necessary (2013), screened at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, is about a woman's struggle of living in Kenya after the elections unrest in 2007. This movie does not only focus on the character's mental states but also helps the world to realize the collapsed situation of Kenya, which started from colonization.