‘Wrong Generation’ Is a Land mark For Independent Film making

Windhoek is the kind of place where you regularly see the country’s biggest film stars in the grocery store. Award-winning filmmakers pore over scripts at local coffee shops and some of the activists who marched in the historic ShutItAllDown (2020) protests gaze up at Shili Munyama’s ‘Wrong Generation’ (2026), hoping to find some fidelity.

While ‘Wrong Generation’ is inspired by executive producer Ndiilokelwa Nthengwe’s book ‘‘You F…. With the Wrong Generation! – An Ode to Modern Day Activism in Namibia’ (2022), which reflects on the 2020 demonstrations, Munyama’s film is fiction.

If you attended the protests and plan on seeing the film, which is showing at local cinemas from 19 to 26 June, you’ll need to keep that firmly in mind. Despite documentary footage from the ShutItAllDown protests interspersed throughout the runtime and a marketing drive that highlights the marches, ‘Wrong Generation’ is more approximation than faithful and detailed retelling.

Written and directed by Munyama and starring Gloria del Mar, Hazel Conchata and Ngunde Faroeka, the film follows a group of estranged best friends who reunite to stage a protest after their childhood companion, played by Ndayola Ulenga, is killed during a slew of brutal murders.