How to Build a Library
When two local women set out to decolonize Nairobi’s formerly whites-only McMillan Memorial Library and turn it into a multicultural hub, they must contend with their country’s history and a complicated web of bureaucracy over eight very long but rewarding years.
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Friday, May 16, 2025
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- Matinee
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
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- Matinee
Until 1958, Nairobi’s McMillan Memorial Library was reserved for white patrons only. Its marble columns, colonial portraits, and dusty shelves still echo with that history. Now, two women—Shiro and Wachuka—are determined to transform the institution into something radically inclusive: a living, accessible, community-driven cultural hub.
How to Build a Library follows their multi-year effort to restore not only the building, but its purpose. As founders of the nonprofit Book Bunk, they raise millions in funding, navigate city politics, and tackle the deeper challenge of confronting what to keep and what to let go. Can a place built for exclusion become one that fosters belonging?
Directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King embed with the project over time, capturing the labor and emotional weight of reclaiming colonial space. The archival materials unearthed—texts on British imperial theory, photographs of white settlers lording over the land—offer no easy answers. But through frustration, laughter, and resilience, a new vision begins to take shape. The film resists spectacle and tidy resolution. Instead, it honors the messy, beautiful work of reclaiming space—brick by brick, shelf by shelf, decision by decision. How to Build a Library becomes its own kind of archive: rooted in friendship, shaped by history, and built for the generations still to come.
—Nancy Pappas
- Director: Maia Lekow, Christopher King
- Principal Cast: Shiro, Wachuka
- Country: Kenya
- Year: 2025
- Running Time: 100 min.
- Producer: Maia Lekow, Chris King
- Screenplay: Maia Lekow, Chris King
- Cinematographers: Christopher King, Wambui Muigai, Emma Nzicka, Ronald Ronics, Nyasha Kadandara, Tomothy Mwaura, Michael Onyiego, Steve Ruiyi
- Editors: Christopher King, Ricardo Acosta
- Music: Katya Mihailova, Maia Lekow, Daniel Hoffknechtt
- Website: Official Film Website
- Filmography: The Letter (2021)
- Language: English, Kiswahili
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- Format: DCP
- International Sales: Autlook Filmsales