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Anne Mungai (born 1957) is a Kenyan director and filmmaker. She is credited as being the first Kenyan woman to direct a feature length film, the 1992 Saikati.

Education
Mungai trained in film at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication

Directorial Career
Anne Mungai’s directing career began in 1980 with her first short entitled Nkomani Clinic. Mungai's first feature length film was Saikati (1992). This film, like many of Mungai’s works, focuses on a female character who finds living in a time in Africa that is split between traditional African culture and the cultural practices that were brought over from the Western world during colonization.

Saikati (1992)
Saikati was funded by the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication as Mungai was an alumnus of the school and the equipment was provided by the Fredrick Engel Foundation. The script was work-shopped at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication with help from a script consultant. Mungai and the script consultant did not have the same vision for the Saikati during the writing process and this meant Mungai did not have full creative license of the film. Some of the scenes that were added to the film against Mungai’s wishes did not have the same cultural content or story that she had in mind, but Mungai still succeeded in getting the main message she was aiming for across to her audience; the challenge women face because of the urbanization of Kenya and how difficult it is for them to navigate the rural-urban drift of the country while also working to discover who they are in terms of their education, beliefs, and sexuality and how they fit into post-colonial Africa. The film looks at these topics by asking questions from an intersectional point of view i.e. through depictions of class, gender, sexuality, age, and ethnicity.

It depicts a young woman named Saikati who is conflicted between wanting to go to university to get an education in the city, and following her parents wishing and getting married to the Chief’s son; a marriage her family has arranged. Ultimately she decides to run away from the traditional life she left behind and goes to live with her cousin Monica who has a job in the city and says she can help Saikati get a job so she can afford to go to school. Once Saikati arrives in the city, she realizes that her cousin is a prostitute and the job she has lined up for her is in the same profession. Saikati finds herself caught “between two evils: forced marriage and prostitution”. Saikati realizes that although she wants to run away from forced marriage, she does not want to lose the cultural practices she left behind in the Maasai “Maara” because the culture she left behind is still part of who she is even though she would like to get an education.