The Kitchen

A directorial debut for both co-directors, Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares, “The Kitchen” is a tale set in a near-future dystopian London. Tackling the inaccessibility of affordable housing while turning the volume up to eleven, “The Kitchen” almost reads like a damning premonition of what’s to come as the gap between rich and poor widens to even more damning degrees.

Izi (Kane Robinson) lives in the Kitchen, a take on a futuristic housing project that has truly become a world of its own, like a mutated stack of buildings reminiscent of Hong Kong’s former Kowloon Walled City. Sequestered on the outskirts of metropolitan London, the Kitchen houses the city’s poor community and is the frequent target of brutal, violent police raids. Izi works in the city at a futuristic funeral service, Life After Life, where families too poor to afford a burial can instead have their loved ones turned into trees for planting. Anticipating that his community is on the brink of a final takeover from the government, they have been prepping and saving up to move out of the Kitchen. On the whole, Izi is a loner, having only acquaintances and no friends (later affirmed by the fact that he didn’t know his closest friend had a daughter). He has no one to look out for but himself, but his plans become complicated when he has a run in with recently orphaned Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman).