A biracial American girl tries to win the heart of a British-Pakistani volunteer doctor, as they road-trip by motorcycle from Sudan to South Africa. A coming of age love story, and a look at neocolonialism in the modern age.
Kenzie is a 19-year-old, mixed race American. Craving adventure, and curious about the world - she’s convinced her family to vacation in
South Africa. But her parents love their creature comforts, and it’s not the experience she’d imagined.
They’re on a sheltered luxury safari, surrounded by old-school racial dynamics. They’re the only folks of color amongst a group of white tourists.
Her interest is piqued when she encounters Tadej. The safari’s charming, young, British-Pakistani physician’s assistant.
He code switches with ease between the European clientele, and the black African staff. He’s training to work with Doctors Without Borders. She confides to him that she dreams of traveling by motorcycle down the East coast of Africa. “Why not?” he asks her, with winning seriousness.
He embodies everything that Kenzie wants in life.
She’s immediately smitten.
But, he seems far out of reach. Too grown up, too worldly, too attractive.
When she goes home - she resolves to become the kind of person that he could fall for.
We cut to 5 years later.
24-year-old Kenzie is traveling solo by motorcycle from Sudan to Cape Town. Tadej is stationed in Ethiopia, with Doctors without Borders.
Our story begins.
• Top 5 Finalist for AT&T & Tribeca Film Institute’s UNTOLD STORIES Program
• WINNER of the AT&T & Tribeca Film Institute Fan Favorite Award of $50k
We pitched live to an industry panel including Mira Nair, Len Amato, Kal Penn, and Katie Holmes - and to 3 million viewers at home.
Our project received the most votes on social media, and we won the Fan Favorite Award for $50k in development funds.
The images in this deck are primarily taken from our extensive location scout in Ethiopia, and from our Proof of Concept sizzle reel,
shot in South Africa and Mozambique.
Kaliya Warren is an award-winning writer and director. She enjoys combining visual spectacle with well-drawn character studies. Most recently, Warren served as the Series BTS Director for Disney's OBI-WAN KENOBI, and as the cinematographer on HBO and Issa Rae’s feature documentary, INSECURE: THE END.
With EXPATRIATES, Warren was a Top-Five Finalist for Tribeca and AT&T’s Untold Stories competition, and her pitch received the $50k Fan Favorite Award. Warren both directed and DP’d the Proof-of-Concept for EXPATRIATES, shooting on location in South Africa and Mozambique. In addition, she’s directed and filmed projects in Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
Warren co-directed THE ROAD TO JUSTICE, a documentary commissioned for The Nation Magazine and premiered at HBO's Urbanworld Film Festival. Her commercial clients have included Hulu, Vanity Fair, Delta Air Lines, and Facebook. Warren is a member of IATSE Local 600, International Cinematographers Guild.
I studied abroad in Tanzania at 19 years old. The experience was incredible - but not quite what I expected. I was the only student of color amongst a group of white Americans. And I was jarred to realize that Tanzanians saw me - a light-skinned black American - as “Mzungu,” or as a white person. Eventually, I found my place in the in-between: volunteering at the community center of an exiled Black Panther, in a rainforest near Kilimanjaro.
At 24, I returned to East Africa, and spent the summer in rural Uganda. I met a group of three young men traveling by motorcycle from Scotland to Cape Town. I poured over their photos and adventures with envy. The kernel of an idea was born.
My earliest experiences of movies were the Disney renaissance films. Full of young heroines yearning to escape their sheltered surroundings, to seek adventure and romance in the “great wide somewhere.” Then, as I got older - I fell for layered, realist travelogues like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, and the BEFORE trilogy.
I see EXPATRIATES as an extension of both. A young ingenue embarks on an epic, music and spectacle filled journey. But it’s set within a world that we recognize. And Kenzie and Tadej’s relationship is complex. We watch Kenzie as she places Tadej on a pedestal, and does everything she can to become his equal. In the end, we leave her not as a Disney princess - but as a woman who has learned that she deserves her own pedestal.
