September 2014 — September 2024
RECA @ 10
A Decade Of Visual Storytelling
Ten years of visual storytelling, creative community and learning what it means to tell stories from here.
This is not simply a timeline of projects. It is a look back at the people, places, experiments and relationships that shaped Re-Tuning Cinema in Africa.
The Beginning
Nairobi · 2014
An idea about African cinema became a place for people, conversation and eventually production.
Before RECA Became
A Production House,
It Was An Idea.
Re-Tuning Cinema in Africa began on 4 September 2014. At its centre was a belief that African stories deserved spaces where they could be discussed, developed and told by people who understood the worlds those stories came from.
Mark Wambui, Rosemary Wambui and Saum Idd began building around that idea. There was no ten-year map laid out in front of them. There was curiosity, a love for cinema and a desire to bring people together around storytelling.
Making · Learning · Experimenting
The People Behind The Story
Finding A Community
Film clubs, conversations and the people who gathered around a shared curiosity for cinema.
The Story Grew
Through People.
Some of RECA's earliest work was about creating community around film itself. Film clubs offered a place to watch, discuss and question cinema together.
These conversations explored the stories being told, who was telling them and what African cinema could look like when the people closest to those stories had space to shape the conversation.
Storytelling was never treated as something that began only when a camera started recording. It began much earlier — with listening, discussion and people bringing different experiences into the same room.
That community-first approach became part of RECA's identity and continued to influence the company even as the work expanded into larger productions and partnerships.
Growing Into The Work
Community created the foundation. Production became another way to continue the same conversation.
Then We
Kept Making.
Becoming RECA
From a community around cinema to a production house shaped by making.
The Work Became
The Classroom.
RECA gradually moved from creating spaces around cinema into producing stories. Every project became an opportunity to learn — how to work with people, understand an audience and translate an idea into images.
The work also meant learning how to solve the hundred small problems that sit behind every finished production: schedules, locations, logistics, equipment, crews, interviews, sound, light and the unexpected.
The scale changed over time, but the process remained collaborative. A production might begin with a conversation, a rough concept or a problem that needed communicating.
RECA's role became finding the human story inside that starting point and building the right visual language around it.
A Company Built Through Collaboration
Each project added another piece to what RECA was becoming.
Behind The Frame
The crews, locations, edits, decisions and problem-solving behind every finished piece.
The Final Film Is
Only Part Of The Story.
Behind every finished piece were locations to find, equipment to move, people to coordinate, interviews to prepare, frames to compose and sound to capture.
There were edits to question, plans that changed and decisions that sometimes had to be made in minutes. Production taught RECA to remain flexible without losing sight of why the story was being told.
Along The Way
Stories Are Never
Made Alone.
As RECA grew, so did the range of people and organisations that invited us into their worlds. The stories moved across development, education, humanitarian work, media, sport and social impact.
Each collaboration required a different way of listening. Those relationships took the team into new communities, unfamiliar environments and conversations we might never otherwise have entered.
Different worlds. Different audiences. Different stories. One shared belief in what a well-told story can do.
September 2024
Ten Years Later
A moment to gather the people behind the journey and look at what the first decade had become.
Then We Looked
Back.
Ten years offered a reason to stop for a moment and recognise how much of the journey had been built through other people. The anniversary brought together members of the community, collaborators and friends who had become part of RECA's story.
It was less about declaring that something was complete and more about understanding what the first decade had made possible.
Looking backwards meant remembering the beginnings, the experiments, the projects that changed direction, the people who joined along the way and the relationships that survived beyond individual productions.
It also made one thing especially clear: there was no version of RECA's history that could be told only through its finished films.
The People
The filmmakers, producers, photographers, editors, technicians and collaborators who made the work possible.
RECA Has Always
Been More Than
The Work.
A camera can capture an image, but it cannot create the relationships behind it. Across the years, filmmakers, producers, photographers, editors, technicians, collaborators and friends brought their own perspective into RECA.
Some were part of one production. Some stayed for a season. Some became part of the company's longer journey. Each person contributed something to the culture, the craft and the way the next story would be approached.
Part Of The Creative Family
Gathoni Ireri·Joseph Muchiri·Davis Gitari·Gicheru Wanjiku·Kennedy Amungo·Eugene Musau·Quasi Maina·Kennedy Kyalo·Mutai Emmanuel·Michael Mwangi·Maureen Saningo·Kidaman Adrian·Wambui Kariuki·Selina Mutinda·Jane Nthanze
Ten Years
Taught Us To
Keep Listening.
The tools changed. The cameras changed. The scale of the productions changed. But the most important part of the process remained remarkably simple: listen first.
Listen to the person whose story you are carrying. Listen to the community around it. Listen to the people you are making it with. Then find the form that allows that story to live.
Ten Years Of Visual Storytelling
2014 → 2024 → What Comes Next
We're Not
Done Yet.
The first decade gave RECA a history. It did not give the story an ending.
There are still people we have not met, places we have not filmed and stories that have not yet found their frame. The next chapter begins the same way the first one did — with an idea and someone willing to tell us about it.