How this Kenyan filmmaker turned African mourning traditions into a movie

Inside a wealthy family’s home, mourners have gathered around the body of its patriarch. Among them is a professional mourner, Anam, trained to guide families through the rituals of loss. Then a mysterious Negotiator enters the house, carrying the authority of Death and opening a conversation between the living and the dead.

However, this ritual is not really about the dead patriarch.

It is about Anam, a young woman who has spent years helping other people confront death while remaining emotionally numb since her own mother died 16 years earlier.

That contradiction sits at the centre of Anam’s Wake, a Kenyan psychological thriller written and directed by Likarion Wainaina.

The film turns professional mourning, African spiritual traditions and unresolved grief into the machinery of a supernatural story.

Likarion Wainaina explained in an interview with bird story agency that Anam’s Wake grew from questions he carried home from wakes and ‘matangas’ after losing people close to him in early 2024.

“I was like, I have too many questions, and I’m afraid if this grief hits me later, it’s gonna finish me. So I better just put down my thoughts, put down my questions about grief, questions about death on paper,” he explained.

Every time he attended burials and moved through the rituals, he returned to ordinary life.

However, something about the process stayed with him.

“I didn’t feel authentic,” he recalled. “I didn’t feel honest.”

He began thinking about what happens after the burial, when the mourners go home and the ceremonies end.

For Wainaina, grief could remain dormant and return much later.

“Grief has no timeline, death has no timeline,” he said. “Even if I lost someone 20 years ago, it could feel like yesterday.”

He describes Anam as a professional mourner trained to summon ‘Death’ and negotiate the passage of souls.

Her first solo ritual takes her to the influential Ebale family home, where a ceremony for the patriarch becomes a reckoning with secrets, memory and her own history.

That makes Anam’s profession part of the film’s central irony. She has chosen a life surrounded by grief, but her own grief remains suspended.

Her work allows her to enter other people’s mourning, perform the rituals and guide families through the encounter with death. The ritual gives structure to emotions that, for her, have remained unresolved.

Then ‘Death’ turns the negotiation back on her.

Wainaina began by writing down the questions that had followed him home from funerals.

The material grew into a story, then a screenplay and eventually a film.

The process became a form of personal therapy.

“I know one day I will watch it and use it as the therapy that I created it for myself,” he said.

By the time audiences encountered the film in Kenyan cinemas, that private exploration had acquired a public life.

One viewer told Wainaina that she had lost her mother four days before watching the film and found the experience helpful.

Another viewer had watched the film six times in cinemas and told him each screening gave her another cathartic encounter with the loss she carried.

“That shook me to my core,” he said.

The reaction suggested that a story born from one filmmaker’s questions about grief could become a vessel for audiences to process their own.

Julia Gaitho, who has watched the film during its theatrical run, was struck by the complexity of its story.

“I’m so happy to watch a Kenyan film that has such a layered script,” she said. “When you get to one part of the film, and then, oh, it connects to this part of the film, and then, oh, that’s why that thing happened at the beginning.”

She was particularly taken by the way the story shifts the audience’s sympathies as it unfolds.

“You find yourself sympathizing with the villain, and you don’t know who you need to be rooting for,” she said. “Anam’s Wake has that. I love it.”

The film also sent her looking towards the cultural traditions behind its story.

Gaitho said it sparked her curiosity about Luo mourning culture and the role of professional mourners in the spiritual journey of the dead.

“As an African, that script was so well done,” she said, praising the performances and the depth of the story.

The professional mourner, the gateway into the film, was a figure Wainaina encountered during his research into African mourning traditions.

The practice exists across some African societies. In Kenya, Wainaina identified Luo and Luhya communities among those with traditions of professional mourning. He also found references to the practice in Congo, Malawi and parts of North Africa.

For Wainaina, the research revealed a profession carrying a deeper social role than the contemporary image of hired mourners might suggest.

Professional mourners helped create an environment in which grief could be expressed and mourning could take place collectively.

His research also revealed how the practice had changed across generations.

“The biggest surprise for me was finding out that this thing had been watered down with every generation,” he said.

He became interested in the gap between the deeper purpose of the practice and its more commercialised expression.

That discovery became one of the foundations of Anam’s Wake.

The film takes a real mourning practice and pushes it into the supernatural.

Anam is not simply hired to cry at funerals. She has been trained to summon ‘Death’ and negotiate for the dead.

Her first solo assignment should be a ritual. Instead, ‘Death’ arrives early and the family wake becomes an interrogation.

The professional mourner therefore becomes more than a character in the story. She is the mechanism through which Wainaina brings an African cultural practice into a psychological thriller.

The wealthy family provides the setting for another tension running through the film: the changing relationship between generations and tradition.

Wainaina chose the Ebale family because it allowed different attitudes towards tradition to occupy the same house.

An older brother has studied abroad and built a successful modern life. The youngest family member, Amani, is an artist who remains closely connected to tradition.

The family’s wealth creates the physical setting. Their different relationships with tradition create the dramatic tension.

The result is a family wake where modernity and inherited knowledge repeatedly collide.

That tension extends into the film’s language.

The Negotiator, the mysterious figure who mediates between the living and the dead, can speak any language.

“He can speak any language,” Wainaina explained. “He just chooses who to speak to.”

English becomes the language he uses with family members whose lives have moved towards modernity.

With characters who remain connected to their roots, he moves into their mother tongue.

“In their mother tongue is where all the tradition is held,” Wainaina said. “It’s where all the nuance is held.”

The detail gives language a spiritual dimension.

In the film, language carries more than dialogue. It identifies the cultural world inhabited by each character.

“The Negotiator could speak Mandarin. He could speak French. He could speak another language altogether,” he explained.

His choice becomes a way of recognising the person standing before him and the relationship that person has with tradition.

Wainaina also made a deliberate visual decision that gives Anam’s Wake its distinctive atmosphere.

He moved the story from night to day.

The original screenplay had been set at night, drawing on a familiar visual language of horror and supernatural cinema. Wainaina wanted the story to operate in another register.

He imagined a daytime thriller, with sunlight replacing the darkness traditionally associated with supernatural stories.

He also removed several visual effects he had considered during development, including sequences involving freezing walls, frozen glass and other supernatural manifestations.

The choice placed greater weight on dialogue, performance, the physical environment and the audience’s imagination.

The production design and cinematography consequently became important to the film’s atmosphere.

Rather than building a supernatural world entirely through spectacle, the film places its supernatural encounter inside an ordinary, lived-in domestic space.

The room remains recognisable even as the rules governing it begin to change.

That approach has shaped the film’s critical reception.

Some reviewers have described the film as exposition-heavy, with long stretches of dialogue carrying its mythology and story.

“The criticism is 100% correct,” he said. “It is a very talky film.”

For him, dialogue was part of the filmmaking language. The characters needed room to discuss death, tradition, spirituality and the things families carry across generations.

The supernatural world also extends beyond what appears on screen.

Wainaina imagined a spiritual plane far larger than the physical world occupied by the characters. Showing everything would have required a much larger production while giving audiences a fixed version of a world he wanted them to imagine.

The final scene was designed to open that space further.

He wanted viewers to step beyond the four corners of the screen and consider what exists beyond what the camera can show.

He noted that, the final scene required the cast and crew to reach a particularly intense emotional state. Several people involved in the production had experienced personal loss.

The team managed two or three takes.

“There was a certain emotion that people needed to unleash,” Wainaina recalled.

During production, one person involved in the film approached him and asked for a break after the daily conversations about death became emotionally overwhelming.

“There are real human beings dealing with real emotions every day that people take for granted or do not see the toll it takes on the people making the film,” Wainaina said.

The water sequence created a different production challenge.

The effect was achieved practically on set, with the crew working through several attempts while protecting the wooden floor of the house from flooding.

With 11 and a half days to complete the film, technical decisions had to remain closely tied to the story.

Anam’s Wake opened in Kenyan cinemas on July 31, 2026, on the same day as Spider-Man.

Cinemas initially warned the filmmakers about the competition from the Hollywood blockbuster.

Wainaina notes that the film nevertheless drew strong audiences during its theatrical run, with the team describing the numbers as among the strongest they had seen for a local film in several years.

By the time of the interview, the film had completed several weeks in cinemas, and the team was considering another theatrical run around Halloween.