Pontact Productions Filming Locations and Production Services Kenya East Africa

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IN A BETTER WORLD WINS GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD

PRESS RELEASE: KENYA HOST TO OSCAR WINNER

The powerful drama IN A BETTER WORLD shot in Kenya
Zentropa Entertainments, the most prominent production company in Denmark, shot the Africa scenes of the Oscar and Golden Globe 2011 winner “In a Better World” in Kenya. The film is directed by Danish director Susanne Bier, and the company responsible for bringing this highly acclaimed director’s film shoot to Kenya is Pontact Productions EPZ Limited.
“In a Better World” traces elements from a refugee camp in Africa to the grey humdrum of everyday life in a Danish provincial town. When schoolboys Christian and Elias are involved in a violent incident, their fathers are initially unable to grasp the full implications of the boys' actions. Elias's father, Anton, an idealistic doctor often absent from home while he works in an African refugee camp, tries to communicate his own commitment to non-violence to the boys, but the troubled Christian continues to see Anton's beliefs as a sign of weakness.
Susanne Bier’s script called for a Field Hospital in a huge refugee or IDP camp, remote, harsh and desolate. The recce group was kindly allowed to visit Dadaab Refugee Camp close to the Somali border where they collected valuable reference for the shoot.
The location search took them the length and breadth of Kenya finally deciding upon an existing camp in Kekopey, near Gilgil in the Rift Valley. The residents of this camp had been displaced from their homes in the post-election violence in 2008. Rather than wait for their compensation from Government, they decided to pool their meager resources and buy the 12 acres of land on which they were situated.
With only a few weeks of intense pre-production, the best of Kenya’s freelance crew were hired and production secured all available rooms in the 3 tourist lodges in the area. Art department built an impressive field hospital in the centre of the camp and scoured the country buying up old refugee tents to make the camp bigger.
Meanwhile, local casting director, Lenny Juma, was working closely with the Zentropa casting team to fill as many roles as possible with Kenyan actors. When watching the casting material director Susanne Bier immediately decided to give actor Evans Muthini one of the leading parts in the Kenyan scenes - although this part was originally intended to be played by an actor from Hollywood. In addition to 700 local Extras hired daily, 60 Nubian Extras were brought from Kibera and accommodated in their own tented camp. Furthermore, the former IDP’s were given priority when hiring semi-skilled or unskilled positions.
Besides building a classroom at the local primary school, the production donated the construction materials to the camp residents at the end of the shoot. Apart from salaries for Kenyan crew and cast, 80% of the money was spent in the Gilgil/Kekopey area in a period of two months. This truly demonstrates the value of foreign film productions to Kenya.
“In a Better World” won the 2011 Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Feature, and on 27th February, scooped the Academy Award in the same category.
Another Pontact film, shot almost entirely in Kenya – Caroline Link’s “Nowhere in Africa” - won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature in 2003, raising Pontact’s profile to one of the best production service companies in Africa.