Josiah Kibira

Josiah Kibira is an independent filmmaker who was born in Bukoba, Tanzania.

He is the son of Bishop Josiah Kibira and Martha Kibira. He attended college in Lindsborg, Kansas and graduated with a degree in Business Administration. He later obtained an MBA at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When he was in college, he came to the realization that there were no movies made in Swahili. This thought made him think about possibly making movies in Swahili, the native language of several East African countries including Tanzania.

After contemplating this for several years, he decided to actually write a script for a Swahili movie. After completing the script, it took him another 3 years to actually start the process of making a movie. Finally, the movie Bongoland was made. According to him, the arrival of the digital video cameras made it easy for independent filmmakers to produce their own movies cheaply.

After Bongoland, Kibira continued to write and make movies in Swahili. Tusamehe was his second movie intended to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging African countries at the time, especially his own country of Tanzania.^[1]

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