Veve is a Kenyan film made in 2014 and still in distribution across East Africa. Its writer, Natasha Likimani, is the same Natasha Likimani who co-wrote the screenplay for MTV Shuga Mashariki — which won the AMVCA Best TV Writing award in Lagos. That connection is worth naming because it illustrates something about how the East African screen creative community works: the same writers, directors, and crew members keep appearing across the projects that have sustained Kenyan cinema’s international festival presence for the past decade, building a body of work that is more coherent and cumulative than its visibility in continental trade coverage suggests.
The film was shot on a training initiative called One Fine Day Films Workshops — a co-production between One Fine Day Films and Ginger Ink, backed by DW Akademie, that brought together 56 participants from eleven African countries, selected and mentored through a structured development process. Simon Mukali from Kenya was selected to direct. Egyptian participant Mayye Zayed and Kenya’s Shiv Mandavia served as cinematographers. The film was written by Likimani before the workshop; the workshop was the production infrastructure. The result of that unusual process — a feature film produced within a one-month training initiative — is a multi-threaded political thriller that operates with more structural ambition than most films produced with ten times the development time.
The World of Veve
Veve — khat, the stimulant plant widely consumed across East Africa and the Horn of Africa — is the economic foundation of the community at the film’s centre: Maua, a town where the plant is grown, traded, and exported. The film follows five converging storylines. Amos, a corrupt local MP, wants to become governor; his ambitions require control over the veve export market. Wadu, a shrewd businessman who commands a significant share of the export business, resists Amos’s attempt to muscle in. Kenzo, an ex-convict, wants to kill Amos for murdering his father. Sammy, Amos’s right-hand man, is exhausted by the dirty work and grieving a dead wife. The farmers who grow the veve — the people at the bottom of the supply chain who receive the smallest share of the value of the plant — are trying to organise a union.
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The film is about the specific political economy of a commodity that everyone in the community depends on and nobody controls. It is also about how corruption propagates downward through a system — how the corruption at the top of the political structure requires the corruption of everyone beneath it, and how each person’s complicity in the system is constrained by what they need to survive. This is a specific kind of political analysis, and it is the right kind for a film set in a commodity economy where the violence is economic before it is physical.
What Has Made It Last
The Kenyan cinema audience that discovers Veve encounters a film that is technically the product of a training programme and narratively the product of a writer who knew the world she was depicting from the inside. Likimani’s screenplay gives each of its five storylines enough character depth that the convergence in the third act arrives with genuine stakes rather than mechanical payoff. The cinematography captures the khat-farming landscape of Maua — the green terraces, the market infrastructure, the specific quality of a regional economy built around a plant — with the attention of people who spent time in the place rather than borrowed generic African landscape conventions.
Damaris Agweyu, writing for KenyaBuzz at the time of the film’s release, noted that it exceeded its trailer — a rare reversal that speaks to how well the film’s actual content surpassed its promotional positioning. More than a decade later, the film continues to circulate in East African distribution, introduced to new audiences through streaming and community screenings, because the political conditions it depicts have not fundamentally changed. The veve economy still operates under the same structures. The corruption-at-the-top model of Kenyan politics still functions the same way. The farmers still organise against the same obstacles.
A film that is still relevant twelve years after it was made is a film that understood its subject at depth.
RCA Score: 7.8 — Good Cinema
Veve (2014) · Dir. Simon Mukali · Kenya · Co-production: One Fine Day Films / Ginger Ink · Written by Natasha Likimani · Stars: Lowry Odhiambo, Emo Rugene, Lizz Njagah, Conrad Makeni · Cinematography: Mayye Zayed, Shiv Mandavia · Available on Apple TV. In continuing East African distribution.
— Wanjiru Kamau. RollCallAfrica, Nairobi. 15 May 2026. Sources: Wikipedia (Veve, 2014 film), IMDB production data, Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews, AMVCA 2026 official results (Natasha Likimani / MTV Shuga Mashariki).
