At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a musician couple on Kenya’s coast is pushed to breaking point as disappearing gigs and mounting financial pressure threaten not only their livelihood, but also their marriage.

The movie, Tides, premiered yesterday, August 8, and is the latest feature film by filmmaker Reuben Odanga. The musical drama follows Salma (Sarah Hassan) and Biko (Brian Kabugi), the husband-and-wife duo behind the Mbalamwezi band. Their world begins to unravel when live performances dry up just as they are confronted with their daughter’s life-threatening heart condition and an overwhelming medical bill.

With their income gone and hope fading, the couple is forced into impossible choices to keep their family and music alive. Among them is the painful decision to seek financial support by entering relationships with other people. What begins as a desperate bid for survival soon becomes a profound test of love, dignity and the vows that once held them together.

Reuben Odanga, Multan Production Limited CEO during an interview at his offices at Karen Connection, Nairobi on June 6, 2023.

Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group

“Life can really throw people under the bus. The inability to earn a living and in a world where poverty can strip people of dignity and opportunity, moral choices are rarely black and white,” Odanga tells Buzz.

Known for films that explore the many shades of love, Odanga says Tides was inspired by relationships he witnessed between tourists and locals along the Kenyan coast during the Covid-19 pandemic, when jobs vanished and desperation became a way of life.

Rather than recreate the pandemic itself, complete with masks and lockdowns, he chose to set the story in its aftermath.

“I picked bits and pieces from different people’s experiences and built a story around them,” he says.

As the pandemic crippled one industry after another, live-band music, long a fixture in Kenya’s high-end coastal hotels, was among the hardest hit. Bands that relied almost entirely on performances for tourists suddenly found themselves without audiences, income or a clear path forward.

“With Tides, I wanted to explore the human realities behind these relationships and the complex intersection of poverty, desire and survival,” he says.

Turning ‘Tides’ into a business

But while Odanga hopes Tides will entertain audiences and leave them with something to think about, the musical drama represents more than another film on the cinema calendar.

For the filmmaker, it is also a business experiment — an investment he hopes will prove that there is money to be made from Kenyan films beyond cinema tickets.

With Kenya’s film market continuing to struggle, Tides is a bet that a locally produced musical feature can test alternative ways of making money from a film.

“We’ve studied the market. We’ve looked at where the loopholes are, and I’ve made peace with the fact that, because some of us are considered pioneers, we just have to try. Otherwise, we’ll keep discussing and planning forever,” Odanga says.

“If we can break even or even make a margin with Tides, from the different distribution models we intend to use, that would be great.”

The filmmaker plans to test several revenue streams, from cinemas and music streaming to university and private-event screenings.

“We want to start with serious cinema runs in Nairobi before moving to Kisumu and Mombasa. But we also want to do screenings in universities and hopefully start to build a new audience community.”

Unlike his previous productions, Tides comes with an entire music album comprising 17 tracks, most of them original compositions.

While the music plays an important role in advancing the story, it also forms part of Odanga’s wider revenue strategy.

Rather than licensing existing songs, the production commissioned original music, making Tides one of Kenya’s rare feature-length musicals built largely around music created specifically for the film.

“We are hoping to also make some revenue from streaming the songs, which we co-own with Silayo, the music director and composer. Save for three songs, which are renditions, the others are originals,” Odanga says.

Reuben Odanga.

Photo credit: Anthony Njagi | Nation Media Group

The decision to create original compositions was driven as much by economics as creativity. The production initially considered using familiar songs performed by live bands, but the idea quickly became complicated by copyright clearances.

“The legality of getting clearance was extremely technical and expensive. Some of the older songs don’t even have straightforward ownership. You find some rights in Europe, others in America. It becomes almost impossible,” he says.

Music director Silayo wrote, composed and arranged most of the songs, while Odanga’s Multan Productions helped finance the recording.

Owning the music, Odanga says, fundamentally changes the business equation.

“The album has been ready for quite some time. We co-own the IP rights through our agreement, and now the music itself becomes another product.”

The soundtrack, therefore, is not merely supporting the film. It is expected to generate its own income through streaming platforms, creating an additional revenue stream for the production.

Cinema revenue, however, remains the first hurdle.

Having learnt painful lessons from his earlier film Nafsi, Odanga says the team has invested more aggressively in marketing this time while working with a distributor that is already negotiating exhibition opportunities.

“If we can break even from cinemas, praise be to the Lord,” he says.

After the Nairobi run, Tides is scheduled for screenings in Mombasa, while discussions are underway to expand into Kisumu and Eldoret, a city Odanga believes has quietly developed into one of Kenya’s promising entertainment markets.

“The universities will be an important aspect of this. It will be almost like “Cinema Mashinani.” I believe we need to intentionally build communities around Kenyan films, and that is why this move is important for us.”

Odanga sees that community-building approach as the heart of a long-term business model.

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Rather than producing films sporadically, he hopes to eventually release at least one feature every year — and ultimately two — creating enough consistency for audiences to anticipate each release.

“You keep giving people stories until they know every year there’s a Multan film coming. Once you build that community, the next poster you release, your first weekend is already sold out. That’s the vision.”

Yet building that audience remains difficult in a market where foreign productions dominate.

Odanga argues that Kenyan filmmakers are often competing against films that have already recovered their production costs in other markets.

“The reason why Nigerian content leads in our TV and film market consumption is that many of those Nigerian or Latin American productions we watch here are, in most cases, on their third or fourth re-run. They already made their money in their home markets before selling cheaply to broadcasters in Kenya. We can’t compete with that on an original Kenyan production, which is very expensive to produce.”

Kenya’s cinema infrastructure also remains a major setback, according to Odanga.

While Lagos boasts dozens of cinemas, Kenya has only about a dozen nationwide, with Nairobi accounting for more than half of them.

Without scale, he argues, filmmakers are forced to charge higher ticket prices simply to recover production costs.

“We don’t have cinemas in places like Thika, Kitengela or Ongata Rongai. If we had more screens, ticket prices could come down.”

He also believes stronger government intervention could help nurture local productions through clearer local-content regulations, better commissioning standards and a more aggressive crackdown on piracy.

Piracy, he says, remains one of the industry’s biggest invisible taxes.

Every week, he finds episodes of his productions uploaded illegally to YouTube and Telegram, sometimes in remarkably high quality.

“Sometimes it’s flattering because it means people want your content,” he says. “But then you think about all the revenue you’re losing.”

For now, however, Odanga’s attention remains fixed on Tides.

The numbers, he admits, will tell the real story.

“Maybe six months from now we can sit down and look at the data. If this works, we’ll have learned something valuable for the next film.”

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