About
A venture, not a single event.
CineSavour is a cultural film venture. Eastern Africa Tales is our first chapter, the beginning of a longer story that travels region by region.
We exist to make independent and international cinema more discoverable, emotionally resonant, economically sustainable and meaningfully connected to audiences, by bringing film into conversation with the people, places, cultures and traditions from which stories emerge.
Each chapter is a curated cultural moment built around a region and its storytelling traditions, shared through a considered sensory experience. The venture is designed to grow chapter by chapter while a single cinematic sensibility holds it together.
Mission
Cinema in conversation with culture.
To make independent and international cinema more discoverable, emotionally resonant, economically sustainable and meaningfully connected to audiences by bringing film into conversation with the people, places, cultures and traditions from which stories emerge.
Vision
A model that travels.
A scalable cultural film distribution and audience engagement model that helps audiences discover the world's stories through the people, places, traditions and cultural experiences that shape them. Travelling chapter by chapter across regions and genres, CineSavour is designed to operate across cinemas, festivals, cultural venues, hospitality spaces and digital environments.
Our Foundation
Origin as the thread that connects film and cultural experience.
Values
- Cultural specificity over generalisation.
- Curation over volume.
- Origin and authorship credited at every step.
- Sensory experience as part of the storytelling.
- Cinema as a living cultural conversation rather than a passive transaction.
Founder’s Note
I grew up between two languages and two cinemas. Films in Swahili. Films in English. Kenyan films and films from everywhere else. I noticed early that the films closest to home were often the hardest to find. That was the first thing about cinema that pulled me in. Not just what was on the screen, but how it got there. Why some films arrived easily while others did not.
I trained as a filmmaker first, in Nairobi. I then started Panoramic Designs, a small production design company building the visual worlds other people’s stories needed. When I moved to London for my MA in the Business of Film, I spent a year researching how a Kenyan film festival could find sustainable footing in London. During this time, I started travelling alone and later started choosing places because of a film I had loved, or a culture I had only met on a screen.
Being a stranger in places that matter to other people taught me how much a film carries about where it comes from and how often that part is lost when the film travels without its context. That research sits at the root of what CineSavour has become. The rest came from working inside the festival circuit, watching the gap between the films that deserve audiences and the films that find them.
I have spent the last few years organising international events in Kenya and South Africa in addition to film festival involvement. That work taught me how much of what makes a gathering memorable, lives in the details. The room. The hospitality. The small attentions that signal care. The way a host has thought about your arrival before you walk through the door.
CineSavour is what I have been moving towards, in one form or another, for the last few years. A way to bring independent and international cinema into closer contact with the cultures and places that shaped it. A reason to stay with a film beyond the credits.
The first chapter, Eastern Africa Tales, is close to home. The chapters that follow will travel elsewhere, but the idea holds. Sustainable independent cinema. A film is shaped by the place it comes from. Audiences deserve to meet it with that in mind.
Wanjeri
Team & contributors
CineSavour is founded and led by Harriet Wanjeri Thuku. Curators and collaborators will be credited as each chapter takes shape.
Company
CineSavour Ltd · Company no. 16471362