The Champion Nairobi Needs to See Right Now
Zippy Kimundu’s Widow Champion is a powerful, intimate portrait of justice, land, and one extraordinary Kenyan woman — and it’s playing all month at Unseen Nairobi.
By Nik Jackson · May 2026
Where to Watch: Widow Champion is screening throughout the month of May at Unseen Nairobi — the beloved independent cinema, rooftop bar and restaurant tucked away above the city. Book your tickets on Mookh. Tickets are 750 KSh and non-refundable, so lock in your date.
There is a scene in Widow Champion that you will hold for a long time after leaving the cinema.Rodah Nafula Wekesa — the film’s subject, spine, and beating heart — is sitting across from the in-laws who demolished her house while she was at church. She does not shout nor weep, she simply speaks, with a calm that has been forged by seven years of homelessness, countless failed mediations, and an unbreakable will. In that quiet moment, you understand everything- painfully.
Directed by award-winning Kenyan filmmaker Zippy Kimundu, Widow Champion is a documentary six years in the making — and every one of those years shows on screen. Shot between 2019 and 2024 in Ahero, Kisumu County, it follows Rodah as she works to recover the title deed to her own land while simultaneously fighting for other widows facing the same fate: expelled from their homes by in-laws the moment their husbands die, forced to live in markets or beneath trees with their children.
“They called me a witch, a glutton, a mad woman, a prostitute. They even destroyed my house.” — Rodah Nafula Wekesa
The scale of this crisis is staggering. Out of Kenya’s 53 million people, 8 million are widows. Ninety percent of them do not hold title deeds. Fifty percent are under forty years old. In Kisumu County specifically, HIV prevalence runs at nearly three times the national average — in part because cultural traditions demand widows be “inherited” by a brother-in-law to remain on family land, with devastating health consequences for those who comply. Kimundu describes her film as “a battle between culture and modernity,” and that tension crackles through every frame.
Rodah’s work — as a trained “Widow Champion” with local NGO KELIN — centres on community mediation. She brings widows and their in-laws before the Luo Council of Elders, facilitating painstaking conversations that aim not for legal victory, but for restored relationships. It is slow, imperfect, and often painful to watch. Yet it is also the only tool available in a system rife with corruption and patriarchal bias. We follow two of her cases over several years — Mary Atieno and Theresa — and the passage of time becomes its own kind of storytelling, marked by rice harvests, shifting seasons, and incremental, fragile progress.
About the Director: A Filmmaker at the Height of Her Powers
Zippy Kimundu is one of the most exciting documentary voices to emerge from Kenya in recent years. An MFA graduate of New York University with nearly two decades of experience across more than 20 countries, she co-directed a short film with Mira Nair and served as assistant editor on the Disney feature Queen of Katwe. Her debut feature Our Land, Our Freedom premiered at IDFA in 2023 to wide acclaim. Widow Champion — which had its world premiere at Canada’s Hot Docs festival in April 2025, before going on to Tribeca Film Festival that June and the NBO Film Festival in Nairobi that October — marks a significant leap forward. Kimundu is also founder of AfroFilms, a creative collective dedicated to igniting socio-political consciousness across continents, and a film educator for teenage refugee girls through the programme I’ll Tell You My Story.
Her camera work in Widow Champion is characterised by its restraint and intimacy: close-ups of Rodah’s worn shoes trudging through mud, the tense silences between sentences in a mediation, the look on a widow’s face when told to forgive. There is no manipulative score inflating the drama — which makes it all the more affecting.
The Soundtrack: Winyo and Fancy Fingers Set the Tone
The film’s original soundtrack was composed by award-winning Kenyan musician Winyo in collaboration with Polycarp ‘Fancy Fingers’ Otieno — a pairing that brings an authentic East African sensibility to the score. Winyo, one of Kenya’s most respected contemporary artists and known for his deep roots in Luo musical traditions, brings warmth and weight to the film’s quieter moments, grounding the documentary’s emotional landscape without ever overwhelming it. The result is a score that feels as rooted in the soil of western Kenya as Rodah herself… understated, purposeful, and deeply human.
★★★★★ Review: Widow Champion — Paced Brilliance, a must see for May.
Let’s be clear: Widow Champion is not an easy watch. It is slow by design, its mediations meandering, its resolutions often bittersweet rather than triumphant. But that is precisely what makes it extraordinary. Kimundu refuses to give us the catharsis we crave — no dramatic courtroom scene, no villain getting their ‘comeuppance’ — because the women in this film do not get that luxury either. What they get instead is Rodah: patient, tireless, battle-scarred, and simply magnificent.
Rodah Nafula Wekesa is one of the most compelling documentary subjects you will encounter on screen this year. She is neither saint nor superhero — she is a woman navigating an impossible situation with extraordinary grace, carrying her own unresolved fight for a title deed even as she takes on the fights of others. The film never lets us forget this contradiction, and it is all the richer for it.
The Nairobi premiere at Prestige Cinemas last October moved audiences to near-silence – and I was a lucky onlooker. Screening it now, at Unseen Nairobi — the city’s most intimate independent cinema, with its rooftop views and thoughtfully curated programme — feels exactly right. This is a film best seen in community, in a room full of people who recognise the world on screen because it is their own.
There is a real-world urgency to Widow Champion too. Activists at the Nairobi premiere spoke of the Widowed Persons’ Bill currently being drafted for parliament — legislation that could finally give legal weight to the rights Rodah has spent years fighting for through persuasion alone. Siaya County has already passed its own widows’ rights legislation. This film is part of that momentum.
Do not miss it.
In Nairobi Verdict: Patient, piercing, and profoundly necessary. Widow Champion is certainly one of the most important Kenyan documentaries in recent years. It is a film that honours the women at its centre without flinching from the systems that failed them. Catch it at Unseen Nairobi this May. Take someone really cool with you.
Widow Champion is screening throughout May at Unseen Nairobi. Tickets: unseen-nairobi.com · For more on the Widowed Persons Bill, follow Come Together Widows and Orphans (CTWOO).
