Lindiwe Dovey, Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge. 2023. 81 minutes. English. Produced by Circle & Square Productions, Screen World Collective, Chouette Films.

Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge.Given the huge challenges that African filmmakers face-creatively, technically, financially, politically, and ideologically-Kibinge's career is certainly worth celebrating and documenting.Nairobi, the capital of Kenya where Kibinge is based, is an astonishing filmmaking hub because of the large number of high profile and increasingly internationally celebrated female filmmakers who work there.The international dimension of this film industry is of less significance though, as the most illuminating aspect of this documentary is revealing to the viewer what is possible when filmmakers take the tools of storytelling entirely into their own hands.This is particularly pertinent in the East African context, where homegrown, indigenous filmmaking has long been hampered by the legacy of British colonialism, which treated film as an instructional tool, a colonial hangover that contributed to the prevalence of NGO-funded, creatively limiting didactic documentary-making.The region has also often been exploited by foreign filmmaking, including in European or North American films that use the African environment as a backdrop for white stories, or in nature documentaries fetishizing the stunning natural landscapes.The film was produced as part of Dovey's large-scale five-year European Research Council-funded project entitled "African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies."Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge depicts decolonization in action.Kibinge is an engaging and whip-smart creative subject for a documentary.She invites Dovey into her life with candor and generosity, sharing details of her professional journey-which started in a high-flying corporate advertising environment-and even glimpses of her private life as we meet her husband, Joshua (who also works with/for her), young son, Elliot (who describes his mother's achievements as "so crazy"), and her parents, who relate how she didn't crawl or walk as a toddler, but rolled: "the rolling one."Kibinge is multitalented; in addition to her advertising and filmmaking career, she is a founding member of the African literary magazine Kwani? and the founder of Docubox, an East African documentary film fund described in the documentary as a home for independent filmmakers, an initiative to build networks, friendships, trust, and skills.Other subjects in the documentary rightly describe her as a trailblazer.Dovey interviews many colleagues, family, friends, and aspiring-as well as