An investigative portrait of Kenya’s tea plantations traces colonial land theft, corporate power, and the generational fight led by workers and families to reclaim ancestral ground.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
The documentary Kikuyu Land shares a thematic connection to several other Sundance films this year that interrogate the ripple effects of colonialism and challenge the validity of corporate land ownership and influence. The Kikuyu are a tribal people located in the South Central Kenyan highlands—a gorgeous region now dominated by enormous tea plantations, many owned by multinational corporations.
Directed by Andrew H. Brown and Bea Wangondu—the latter, a Nairobi journalist who appears on camera and drives the investigations in the film—Kikuyu Land celebrates the connection people like Wangondu and the film’s other main human subject, Nganga Mungai, have to their ancestral homelands, while trying to shed light on the exploitative labor practices and human rights abuses occurring on the plantations.
For decades, Mungai has been trying to prove that a portion of the land occupied by the tea plantations was historically owned by his family.
When Wangondu catches up with him, he is leading protests, calling on the government’s National Land Commission to fulfill its promises to restore land rights to those who can prove prior ownership, and adding to his robust repository of research about Kenya’s dark history of colonial rule and the resulting thefts of land, resources and people, as well as his family’s specific place in that history. Mungai estimates the land he believes was stolen from his family is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wangondu, for her part, begins to investigate the tea plantations themselves. Heavily guarded, the plantations sit on lush, verdant hills surrounded by inviting forests that belie the cloistered isolation of their workers.
At first, it’s difficult to determine who owns the farms: wealthy Kenyans and multinational corporations who seem quite capable of hiding their exact provenance. Eventually, the filmmakers discover that at least one of these plantations is owned by consumer goods behemoth Unilever (who have since sold the farm to a private equity firm).
When Wangondu manages to make her way onto the plantation grounds, she finds amidst the idyllic scenery and rich soil a troubling legacy of exploitation and abuse. Many families who work on the tea farms become trapped there for generations due to poverty, lack of education, and the backbreaking work required to meet quotas. Women, who make up a large portion of the workers, are routinely raped, with male field managers having almost unfettered power. One anonymous worker tells Wandondu, “The soil is fertile but the land is cursed.”
What stories are we most willing to hear: those that are important, those that are true, or those told with the loudest voices?
For their own protection, many subjects interviewed by Wangondu and Brown speak with blurred faces and distorted voices so they will not incur punishment from their corporate bosses. But a trio of boys, who walk long distances to go to school while their families struggle in the fields, are able to speak freely to the filmmakers.
Stephen, a particularly captivating subject, is an avid reader and worries the kids at school would treat him differently if they knew he lived on one of the plantations. It’s hard to imagine life outside the farm, he says, but also difficult to imagine being stuck in the field for the rest of his life.
In the background, President William Ruto takes power, making it even more challenging to fight the strong arm of persistent colonial control in Kenya. While Ruto campaigned as a “populist,” Kikuyu Land describes his rise to power as one of increasing authoritarianism, marked by his complicity with corporations and the demands of the Global North. In an interview published prior to the festival, Wangondu explains how international encroachment continues unabated in Kenya to this day: “We now have a new French military base. We have the Brits. We have the Americans. Our president is a big neocolonialist.” Ruto, after all, is a shareholder in Unilever and other foreign corporations.
As news of journalists being abducted and people being killed over land disputes filters into the film, Wangondu tries to track down a representative of Unilever willing to address the allegations against the plantations, going so far as traveling to its headquarters in London. When those efforts fail, she seeks answers in archival records. But, as she digs into her own family and its claims to Kikuyu land, she discovers an upsetting history of complicity and betrayal.
Kikuyu Land, a gripping investigation with stakes that are both intimately personal and startlingly global, contrasts the arresting beauty of its geographical setting with the dark underbelly of its secrets. It also makes legible a question that teases at the edges of all documentaries. What stories are we most willing to hear: those that are important, those that are true, or those told with the loudest voices?
