Searching for Amani, a delicately crafted documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, came close to becoming Kenya’s 2025 Oscars submission. Historically, Kenya’s Oscar entries have leaned heavily toward fiction, with The Letter (2020) marking the country’s first documentary submission. In the end, Nawi was chosen—a film that, like Searching for Amani, interweaves real elements of Kenyan society into its narrative. However, while Nawi is purely fictional, Searching for Amani captures an unscripted local story that unfolds with the natural precision of many fictional films.
The documentary follows several formative years in the life of Simon Ali, a young boy with dreams of becoming an investigative journalist, all while grappling with the heavy grief of losing his father. Searching for Amani branches through Simon’s large, close-knit family, into his school and extended compound, and right up to both sides of a conflict he can only make abstract inferences of. Grounded in a keen perspective, the film delivers a sweet yet, at times, heart-wrenching exploration of the thoughts and feelings nurturing Simon’s journey into manhood.
With a runtime of just eighty minutes, it’s surprising how much ground the film covers. On the surface, it is the unadulterated vlog of a boy through his days with a cheap Sony camera. His laughter, childish mannerisms, and the camaraderie of his friends offer vibrant public school nostalgia. Beneath that, it’s an amateur yet fearless investigative piece of a boy asking the right questions about the murder of his father, Steven Ali Apetet, who worked at the Laikipia Nature Conservancy. At its core, Searching for Amani presents a stark image of societal restructuring and the generational tensions it perpetuates.
These layers build upon each other, shaping what could have been carefree days of Simon’s childhood into something much heavier —one burdened with responsibilities no child should bear. Yet Simon’s youthful optimism brings fresh energy into the often stagnant and recurrent conversations surrounding Laikipia’s unresolved land conflicts. He carries the narrative with an introspective and endearing performance that at times, the film is too radiated with predictable fictional tropes and questionable conversations, and you wonder how much of them were forced onto the subject. And it’s mostly because Simon, at the centre of it, feels very much like a titular coming-of-age protagonist. Fitted with a sidekick that delights in lightening his grief, the heart of a hero that drives head first into uncomfortable situations, and a family that fortifies his pride and confidence, Searching for Amani is as close as art mimics reality.
The framing of the film stays true to this vibrancy, using sketch drawings for maps, lingering through the adolescent banter of school children, and employing substitute montages to build on the dialogue and mood of the conversations. Directors Nicole Gormley and Kenyan Debra Akoro stay true to the story of Simon and his limited panorama of a conflict larger than him. With this conflict, the film at times plays too safe into the middle ground with its inquiry of both sides but ultimately lands close to the heart in the last act that digs into the central theme of the unanswered questions on the other side of grief. Against a backdrop beautifully captured by cinematographer Campbell Brewer, the film feels blunted on the edges as it forages through the fenced conservancy that Simon’s father worked in to investigate his murder and doesn’t linger long enough before moving to something else. And even though the effects of climate change are touched on, they too feel somewhat hastily passed over.
It’s hard to discuss Searching for Amani without placing it alongside The Battle for Laikipia, another documentary that tackles this generations-old conflict between Laikipia’s pastoralists and the descendants of white settlers who now occupy their ancestral land. While the two films cover different timelines and focus on distinct aspects of the conflict, they share undeniable parallels—and coincidentally, both were released this year. Both films highlight the visceral impact of climate change on Kenya’s pastoral communities and the tension between them and white ranchers, even sharing some of the same on-the-ground conflict footage. However, while Searching for Amani is neither as objective nor as in-depth as The Battle for Laikipia, it offers a fresh perspective on the conflict, examining smaller yet significant facets that the latter film doesn’t touch upon.
