Filmmaker Kibwe Tavares on turning ‘aggressive gentrification’ into dystopian drama The Kitchen

Kibwe Tavares was in a boat, just off the coast of Zanzibar, surrounded by an expanse of water. Floating in the Indian Ocean, the filmmaker found his mind returning to London. With him was actor Daniel Kaluuya; the pair were in the middle of shooting Jonah, a short film about the perils of commercialisation, centred on a giant, mythical fish. The production’s underwater camera had broken, and they were waiting for it to be fixed. Kaluuya, still five years away from his international breakthrough in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, pitched Tavares an idea for a film about their home city. 

That was more than a decade ago. Today, at his studio in south-east London’s Biscuit Factory, Tavares and I are discussing the finished project, his vividly realised debut feature The Kitchen. Set in a dystopian London, and co-directed with Kaluuya, it focuses on a crumbling housing estate nicknamed The Kitchen that is destined for demolition. As Izi (Kane Robinson, also known as the rapper Kano) prepares to move out of “the shithole” he’s grown up in, which is the last of its kind and clung to by its residents, he encounters the recently orphaned Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman). Together, they start to see The Kitchen differently and appreciate its strong sense of community with fresh eyes.

“In a typical film, you’ll see the poorer area as dystopian,” says Tavares. “This is a flip of that. If you pull everything that makes London out of London, what does London become?” The Kitchen borrows from science fiction, using VFX to visualise the idea of “aggressive gentrification” where “people are getting ripped out” of their homes. The city is cluttered with digital billboards and surveillance drones; its wealthiest areas are sanded of soul, sleekly anonymous and strangely devoid of people. Despite the sci-fi trappings, Tavares says: “It’s not so much based on science. It’s more of a social and political thing that we based the aesthetic on.”

Daniel Kaluuya attends the closing night gala of ‘The Kitchen’ at the BFI London Film Festival in October © Mike Marsland/WireImageA still from ‘Jonah’

Beyond The Kitchen’s dilapidated exterior, there are pockets of joy, tenderness and ingenuity within the building. Hungover teenagers eat cardamom pancakes together as DJ Lord Kitchener (former England footballer Ian Wright) broadcasts messages of hope on Kitchen Radio. “Sir Uncle, we call him,” says Tavares, grinning shyly (fellow south Londoner Wright has an OBE). “We wanted someone who speaks with that voice of community, that voice of empathy.”

An underground nightclub with its own roller rink is rendered in shades of neon red, orange and green, inspired by parties from Tavares’s own memory, such as a now-shuttered roller disco in Vauxhall, and a rave he attended in a Brazilian favela. “It’s a bit of resistance: people are still finding time to celebrate life and be together,” he says. “All of the community comes to this one thing — everyone shows up.”

It was a deliberate choice to zero in on The Kitchen’s heroic residents while leaving their faceless antagonists in the shadows, says Tavares. He and Kaluuya wanted to explore notions of precarity and threat, focusing on the texture of those feelings rather than the identity of the people driving them. “It felt like any time we wrote that, we didn’t want to see the cutaway to the bad town planners,” he says. “If you’re getting moved on all the time, often you don’t have that information. Your life can shift, but you don’t know the details.”

What was important to him was to make The Kitchen feel “like a fortress” and create a sense that its residents had “made it their own”. Tavares opens an enormous book of photographs to an image of The Tower of David, an unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, and slides it across the table. In the picture, a family of four has repurposed an abandoned office as a living room, and is snuggled up on the floor watching TV. London, he says, is a place that has allowed its neighbourhoods to be reflective of the people that live there. “If you go to Brixton, you can feel the Caribbean heritage, in Ealing, you can feel the Indian community,” he says.

It’s not so much based on science. It’s more of a social and political thing that we based the aesthetic on

Tavares, 40, says his own London has always been made up of “strong units of togetherness”. The middle child of three brothers, he was born in Camberwell to a Grenadian mother, an administrator, and a Jamaican father, a scientist. He spent his youth in various pockets of south London, raised by an eclectic mix of family, friends and neighbours.

His childhood home was messy, filled with books and computers. “My parents were always like, ‘How can we keep them focused?’” he says. He and his brothers built rabbit hutches and drew on their bedroom walls. In the evolving digital age of the 1990s, his dad had started to build his own computers. “He wanted us to use them, but he wanted to make sure we were being creative,” he says. Tavares’s father loaded the computers with animation software, including “cracked copies of 3D Studio Max”. As a 14-year-old, Tavares taught himself to create animations of “little characters that would get into fights”, set to drum and bass music.

Kibwe Tavares photographed for the FT by Christian Cassiel

He studied architecture and engineering at the University of Leeds, and went on to complete a postgraduate degree at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. “I did find myself as the only black person in the room,” he says, adding that “you get used to it”. At the Bartlett, he took a film studies class, and made the animated short Robots of Brixton for his dissertation. Inspired by the 1981 Brixton riots, it imagined an uprising of oppressed robots. “It was my way to talk about where I grew up, and to find a way to articulate my experience,” he says. He hoped that it would get him a job as an animator at a post-production house. “But when I put it out, all the attention I got was for directing,” he says, a job he wrongly assumed was all about running round a set shouting at people with megaphones. His short won a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

With two of his classmates, he started Factory Fifteen, an animation studio that allows them to use their architecture training to design worlds for film and TV. Now he is working on “a big animated film for Netflix,” produced by former Pixar executive Darla K Anderson (producer of Toy Story 3 and Coco). In the same way that a structure is the sum of its parts, he says, you have to have “the building blocks of a story”. If anything is missing — if the foundation is wobbly — the whole thing falls apart.

Though The Kitchen is set in a nightmarish dystopian future, it is grounded in the reality of the present day. “We were chasing the core idea of people just trying to fight for a home,” says Tavares. Resistance, he says, is in the film’s DNA. “That narrative is always relevant.”

‘The Kitchen’ is in UK cinemas from January 12 on Netflix from January 19

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