During the CAPHE project’s mobility of the Polish Society for Aesthetics team in Nairobi in the fall of 2024, inspired by the former Ambassador of the Republic of Poland Mr. Jacek Bazanski, Prof. Aleksandra Lukaszewicz and Prof. Karina Banaszkiewicz-Sadowska started their research on the life and oeuvre of Jacob Barua, a Polish-Kenyan filmmaker.
The research required numerous consecutive interviews with Jacob Barua. He had studied at the Film School in Lodz and conducted many transcultural film projects throughout his career. His life has been full of exciting and inspiring activities, one of which was the role of director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival: ZIFF in 2005-2006.
Through his films and series of photographs as well as through the art events he organizes, Barua engages in a dialogue on identity in an intercultural perspective. This dialogue is carried out in the form of visual narratives that create a world not of division but of inclusion, not of separation but of connected lands and cultures, among which people navigate constantly while changing.
The interviews led researchers from the Polish Society for Aesthetics to develop a new project activity, Virtual Film Memorial. Jacob Barua’s Hybrid BIO-GEO-GRAPHS, which grew up to be submitted for funding in collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland.
The realization of this project will enable the creation and presentation of the Virtual Film Memorial of Jacob Barua – BIO-GEO-GRAPHS curated by Prof. Aleksandra Lukaszewicz in a space that is part of the virtual KONKRET AR.T Gallery, as well as the realization by Prof. Karina Banaszkiewicz-Sadowska of a retrospective of Jakub Barua’s films during the LAMPART Short Film Festival in Mombasa in early March 2025.
The planned activities will also continue the tradition of Polish-Kenyan exchange in the study of film art, bringing Polish culture and the history of Polish-African relations closer, with the use of the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
