Wanuri Kahiu set to direct new film starring Milly Bobby Brown

Hollywood big-shots Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea will be producing the film, where the script will be written by Molly Smith Metzler of Orange is the New Black.

The Thing About Jellyfish follows the story of a young girl named Suzy (Millie Bobby Brown) as she enters seventh grade.

It is the Hollywood treatment of Ali Benjamin’s 2015 novel of the same name and has been in development since 2015 initially at Universal, before changing homes to be produced as a Netflix Original film.

“Suzy is a wonderfully dorky and smart girl whose parents are recently divorced and who just lost her best friend Franny in an accident. She has elected not to speak any longer and goes through seventh grade not talking to anyone, which worries her parents to no end and lands her in therapy,” reads a blurb published by What’s On Netflix.

Wanuri is known mostly for her critically-acclaimed 2018 film, Rafiki, which drew a lot of attention locally for featuring two lesbian lovers. 

Based on the Ugandan short story “Jambula Tree” by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Rafiki made history as the first Kenyan film to be selected for screening at the Cannes film festival. 

Her debut feature film, From A Whisper, received several awards at the 2009 Africa Movie Academy Awards for its fictionalised depiction of the 1988 terrorist attack on the United States embassy in Nairobi.

Kahiu’s other works include Pumzi, an Afrofuturist story of a young botanist living in post-World War III Africa, and For Our Land, a documentary about the life of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai. 

Her latest film, Look Both Ways, is set to be released in August 2022 and stars Lili Reinhart, who plays Betty Cooper on Riverdale.