Runako Celina

(She/Her)

Runako’s breakthrough project is the documentary Death in Dubai.

A love of TV and film has always been in Runako’s blood, but it is her curiosity about the world and instinct for uncovering what lies beneath the surface that have shaped the storyteller she is today.

Inspired by investigative documentaries like Anatomy of a Killing, where journalists and filmmakers used digital tools and forensic storytelling to challenge a government’s narrative to seek accountability for innocent people’s deaths, she remembers thinking “I want to do that”. So, it seems fitting that her breakthrough project Death in Dubai, a two-and-a-half-year investigation into the deaths of Ugandan women Monic Karungi and Kayla Birungi in the UAE, was something that sparked debate in Uganda’s parliament.

In her own words…

“One of the best things that happened to me was starting off in TV outside the UK because it gave me more references for the kind of storyteller I try to be. It made me more confident about resisting some of the industry’s narrower conventions around tone, form and authority, and helped me build my own style and voice. My mantra, especially as a Black investigative documentary maker and on-screen reporter, is: credible doesn’t have to mean “traditional”. Whose traditions became the default to begin with?

“I’m inspired by storytelling that can hold more than one thing at once: the political and playful, serious and celebratory. I grew up around that in my Grenadian, Jamaican and Gambian family, through traditions like griotry and ole mas (carnival), and around media innovators like my aunt, the brains behind Identity Television, the UK’s first Black entertainment TV channel. That mix still inspires me and gives me a fluid relationship with genre, which is part of why my practice now includes fiction too.”