Yet another ‘Kenyan movie’ shot in South Africa
Kenya is continuously losing ground to South Africa as an attractive location for shooting Hollywood movies.
The latest case is the movie, Eye in the Sky. The move is about an American-British military coordinated drone attack targeting a terrorist preparing for a suicide bombing in Nairobi, Kenya.
The irony here is that while the setting of the movie is in a Kenyan village where militants have assembled to prepare for a suicide bombing, the cast has no Kenyan actor.
Instead, the producers went with the Oscar-nominated Somali actor, Barkhad Abdi, who stars in the film as the on-the-ground Kenyan agent.
There have been a number of Hollywood films shot in Kenya in the past including the 1985 production Out of Africa, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
MAJOR PRODUCTION
It’s release led to scores of tourists visiting Kenya for wildlife safaris. It wasn’t until 2005 that another major Hollywood production, The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes, was shot in Kenya.
But Kenya lost to South Africa as the filming location for the film The Journey is the Destination about 22-year-old photojournalist Dan Eldon, an English-born Kenyan who was killed on a Reuters assignment in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Early this year, singer Taylor Swift chose South Africa as the location where she shot a video for her song Wildest Dreams.
In February 2016, there were reports that a movie based on the life of renowned conservationist Richard Leakey, starring Brad Pitt and produced and directed by his wife Angelina Jolie, was to be shot in South Africa.
This prompted Dr Leakey to issues a press statement denying that Africa will be shot in South Africa.
