Architect-turned filmmaker Kibwe Tavares talks us through The Kitchen – the most exciting British sci-fi of 2024.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #48.
“We really only finished the film a week before the premiere.” Kibwe Tavares, co-director of Netflix’s new sci-fi drama, The Kitchen, seems relaxed for a man describing every filmmaker’s most frequent stress-dream.
“We’d had the look locked for a while, but then we still took a minute to finish up some of the visual effects. Then obviously there’re all the quality control things, making sure it looks good on the screen. So, it was hectic around the time… In a way you’re still gathering your own response to it.”
We’re talking in the studio of Factory Fifteen, a collective of artists, architects and filmmakers Tavares founded after completing his own degree at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Once a beating heart of industry in South London, the space is now the image of a trendy young studio: a ping-pong table, a stylish kitchenette and, in one of the photos on Factory Fifteen’s website, a whippet stood on a sofa. The irony of this place producing a film like The Kitchen, which sees the residents of London’s last social housing estate fighting to protect their homes from systemic gentrification, doesn’t seem lost on its creator.
“One of the things we looked into at school was about how cities change, and often it’s about layers and layers of stuff”, Tavares says. “Even something like this, this is an old biscuit factory, and now it’s an art studio. You don’t ever really have this full eradication of a place.”
Grand Designs
The Kitchen is Tavares’ feature debut, almost a decade of shorts, projects and relationships culminating in a distribution deal with Netflix and the chance to close out 2023’s London Film Festival. Set in a near-future London, The Kitchen follows the recently orphaned Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) and reluctant father figure Izi (Kane Robinson) as their home comes under attack from a faceless police force.
The transition from architect to filmmaker might seem like an unusual one, but for this debut feature filmmaker, the move looks like an obvious progression. His first short, Robots Of Brixton, came out of his Masters degree, contrasting humanoid androids railing against police with images of the Brixton riots in 1981. The film earned him the Special Jury Award at Sundance in 2012.
His next short, the The Old Man And The Sea-inspired Jonah, saw Tavares unite with probably his most important collaborator for the purposes of his first feature: The Kitchen co-director (and star of a few films you might have heard of) Daniel Kaluuya.
“Our casting director, Aisha, put us together. I had this big book of Robots Of Brixton that I used to carry around everywhere, and we talked about what we were trying to do with Jonah.”
Watching Jonah now, the journey from there to The Kitchen seems almost inevitable. One scene, a montage of a small fishing village transforming into a bustling tourist trap, treats shop fronts and unfolding neon signs in the same way that Tavares’ new feature looks at the London skyline, newly peppered with impossible glass structures seamlessly polluting the UK’s most famous view.
“A lot of that stuff came from school, and how I see the world in that sense,” he says.
“For Jonah, we were definitely trying to be more overt and use that stuff in a more in-you-face, poppy sort of way, showing how time transitions as a part of the storytelling. In The Kitchen, the whole premise was much more grounded, and so I really tried to build on top of what was already there.”
But still, that same sense of melancholy pervades every frame of The Kitchen – of history giving way to modernity in the same way the estate’s residents are being turfed out in the name of progress.
“I’ve lived in London all my life, and so you see things change.”
“You can be stood round the Gherkin, and then you’ll see an old church right next to it, both built decades apart. But you always have that contrast. And it’s more about sort of like these layers that get added as opposed to sort of like, complete annihilation of what’s there.”
Hand Built By Humans
Far from a purely technical achievement, The Kitchen is a film with a social conscience. A sci-fi story unafraid of allegory, the team took influences from sources as diverse as Peter Bogdanovich and Spike Lee.
“Children Of Men was a reference for a sci-fi that just felt really impactful, Paper Moon was a big story reference, Do The Right Thing, La Haine… All these films that you see as seminal that you’re influenced by as you’re writing and working out what you want to say.
Like those films, there’s an unmistakably human angle in The Kitchen too.
“My big experience growing up was we moved around a lot as kids. We lived in a lot of different places in South London. So the idea of not being rooted, not being grounded, not knowing what home means… It wasn’t like an external thing of, how do I talk about this message more, it’s more built on my own experience.
“For me, I’m always just trying to say, you know, you want to say something with your film, you’ve got this amazing canvas to tell a story and to make an impact. And maybe that’s what attracts me to certain stories with certain ideas, like, how can I use the things that influenced me and talk about specific things that feel present to me.”
Low-fi Sci-fi
While The Kitchen is a sci-fi story through-and-through – giant, circular skyscrapers aside, Izi swipes through emails on his bathroom mirror and the dead are put to rest in a corporate greenhouse which turns relatives into shrubs – there’s a sense through Tavares’ filmography that the genre is more a means to an emotive end than a technological fascination.
“I trained as an architect, but I was very much into animation and building stuff on the computer, so I wanted to use those techniques, and that naturally lends itself to sci-fi. But I don’t go into the science of any of it really. It’s more a way to talk about culture and experience. Like, how can I directly talk about immigration, gentrification, commercialisation of this beautiful place, and how can I do that visually and using these techniques I’ve been developing.”
Over the years, Tavares has become adept at blending his fascination with the built environment with the stories of the people who built it. Throughout his shorts, it’s clear that these fantastical elements heighten the films’ social aspects, rather than detract from them.
“I like the idea that sometimes you can be slightly more direct with abstraction, you can have the police as antagonists in The Kitchen, or use robots as an allegory for immigrants in Robots Of Brixton. You can be sort of direct with your thing, because you don’t need to say it out loud – you can show it more.”
“There were definitely versions of the script that had more sci-fi elements in, but I think what happens over time is you have too many ideas in there, and some of them need to take front and centre. So with The Kitchen, it was like, how do we tell this really human story in a way that feels elevated, but it’s still a human story.
“That was the ambition, but we definitely did have drafts that had a lot more technology and stuff in them, but then you almost lose the story because the story is so nuanced. So it’s almost like a balancing act, and you have to either make the story bigger or tone down the other stuff.
Under The Hammer
The villains of The Kitchen are, as in much of Tavares’ work, largely invisible. When a lorry is hijacked by a gang of Kitchen residents on motorbikes in the film’s explosive opening, their leader is quick to reassure the driver that the heist is nothing personal. When the police arrive to turf the people out of their homes later on, they’re dressed head-to-toe in riot gear, faces hidden behind visors and masks. Even Izi’s attempts to buy a new flat go through, not a human estate agent, but a computer.
“There’s a version of this film where you can show all the town planners trying to kick people out. But anytime we started to think about or write any versions of that, it became very plot-y. So we always wanted to stay within The Kitchen.”
Read more: The Kitchen review | Daniel Kaluuya’s directorial debut is a dystopian triumph
“And so really the idea was to allow that sort of thing to come through Izi. He’s someone who wants out of The Kitchen, he’s in and out of Benji’s life, and more than anything he’s unreliable. So it’s more about trying to bring that up through the central relationship rather than it being an external factor. Because this guy’s kind of internalised the external in a way, he’s been told if he goes outside, he’s going to have more value, and he starts to believe that.”
Sealing The Deal
So how does Tavares feel about his film, and his journey as a filmmaker, now The Kitchen is out in the world? For a project so many years in development, it’s a difficult question to answer.
“I think you evolve. And especially when you have a project that takes a long period of time, you also change a bit as a human, really. But naturally, you’re you, so I try and bring my experiences and the things I want to talk about into these things.
And The Kitchen started quite soon after Jonah, especially with some of the architecture stuff, that was straight from uni. And so we sort of built this place…” He looks around at the exposed piping and the coffee machine against the opposite wall, “…around the same time. So all those shifts and changes that you go through, they start to kind of feed into the work and what you’re saying about the world.
“It’s not so much about reinvention. It’s more about building on what’s gone before.”
The Kitchen is streaming on Netflix now.
