Movie-Database

Peres Owino

Biography

Peres Owino was born in Kenya and now works in the US as an actress and scriptwriter for theatre and film. She also runs a blog and has recently published the novel “On the Verge”. With her award-winning 2014 documentary BOUND: AFRICANS VS. AFRICAN AMERICANS, she made her debut as a film director. The idea behind it is based on her own experiences with African-American women when she arrived in the United States. “I came to America with the idea that African Americans would be open to me and was quite shocked when the first African American I met said to me, “I’m not African, I’m from Chapel Hill, North Carolina and you people sold us.”

That put me in this space where I had one of two options: withdraw or engage. I chose to engage and… I found a way to bring together the African and African American students at our University…”, says Owino, who at that time was studying in Wisconsin. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she lived in an African-American neighbourhood, and “it took me almost 3 years to speak to any of my neighbours, all of whom are African American… and the lesson I came out with after 4 years of toiling through this is that we are all the other half

of each other’s story. We all carry just one half of our own history and we need to sit and talk to the people on the opposite side of that history to get the full story. And there is where the healing lives.”

Filmography

BOUND: AFRICANS VS. AFRICAN AMERICANS (2014): Actor, Guest, Screenplay, Direction