Filmmaker from Kenya Shares His Motivation

Tony Koros is an award-winning filmmaker and television writer. He shares how he overcame his fear of disappointment and learned to trust God and himself.

“What I’ve been saying to myself lately is, ‘perfect love drives out fear’ — and that’s a useful sentence in almost any situation,” he shares.

Video Transcript

From Kenya to New York City: Tony is an award-winning filmmaker and television writer.

Tony Koros: What I love to do is present Kenyans the way I know them — beautiful, complex, and angry, and fun, and silly, and mean, and just full, complex human beings whose stories deserve to be told.

There’s always a moment when I’m writing when I’ll feel like things are just like magic and everything is coming out of me and I’ll read it back and I’ll go, “This is horrible.”

It’s very rewarding to get to the end of that journey — to feel like I stuck it out and I told a good story. My most recent film is called Tithes and Offerings.

Actor and actress exchanging lines in a film, with some words in Swahili:
Ah my sister, how are you?
I’m fine, thank you.
You look lovely today.
Thank you, pastor.
The glory of the Lord, eh?
Yes.
Welcome, welcome.

Tony: What I’ve been saying to myself lately is that perfect love drives out fear, and that’s a useful sentence in almost any situation. But for a long time, I feel like I was driven by fear — fear of disappointing people, fear of writing badly, fear of trusting God, trusting myself.

Actor and boy speaking in Swahili in a film.

Tony: My faith influences my work and the choice of stories I tell, and I love to be able to include images of beauty in my work. We don’t get enough of that, and I feel like it’s necessary. Because many times you won’t be able to communicate your faith through your very well-reasoned arguments; or you could, but that just won’t have the same emotional impact as just an image of beauty that you find in the world.

I write because of the people who helped me get here. I write because of the stories I’m telling. And sometimes I write because it’s all I am trying to do. There you go.