Fahad Ahmed
·
Isaac Marumo is a Botswana writer, director, and cinematographer who founded Quihaba Pictures and moved to the Okavango Delta to film its wildlife and the stories of his home.
Isaac Marumo has spent two decades teaching the craft, building a company around it, and telling Botswana's stories. In 2024 he moved to the Okavango Delta to point the camera at something wilder.
Isaac Marumo did not arrive at filmmaking by way of a film set. He arrived by way of a classroom. Before he was a director, he was the person at the front of the room: a multimedia lecturer at Limkokwing University, teaching 3D and 2D animation and eventually leading the programme. For the better part of a decade, his job was to put the tools in younger hands and watch what they made.
That is a particular way to fall in love with a craft, from the side of teaching it rather than only doing it. It shows in how he describes the work. "My unwavering belief in the transformative power of storytelling," he writes, "fuels my passion for crafting narratives that resonate with audiences on a profound level." It reads like someone who has had to explain, many times, why any of this matters.
The stories he chose to tell
When Isaac turned to his own projects, he kept choosing stories with weight. Young Phoenix, a short-film series on mental health, earned an Honorable Mention at the Bantu Film Festival in 2023; he wrote it, co-directed it, and cut it himself. He worked on Dithunya tsa Rona (Our Flowers), a feature-length docudrama shot in Gaborone about a social worker confronting teenage pregnancy and child abuse, a film built to push a community toward safer homes.
Across a run of work, Tswanalized, a cultural documentary series, sports television, commercials for the national telecom, the through-line is less a genre than a posture: point the camera at Botswana, and take the subject seriously.
The company, and the habit of building things
Isaac builds the structures around the work, not just the work. He founded Quihaba Pictures, the production house his films come out of. It is of a piece with the teaching: a person who keeps making the room that other work can happen in, the programme, the society, the company.
He calls himself "committed to lifelong learning," someone who "eagerly embraces new challenges and opportunities for growth." That is easy to write and hard to do. Isaac did it the literal way.
Into the delta
In 2024 he moved his operation to the Okavango Delta and turned toward wildlife filmmaking, completing an advanced course at a Botswana wildlife film school to do it properly. It is a real pivot. A career spent on human stories, on parenting and mental health and culture, now pointed at one of the largest inland deltas on earth and the animals moving through it. The belief stays the same, the transformative power of storytelling, but the subject can no longer be directed. It can only be watched, and waited for, and caught.
About
Isaac Marumo is a writer, director, and cinematographer based in Botswana and the founder of Quihaba Pictures. A former multimedia lecturer at Limkokwing University, he has written, directed, shot, and edited across documentary, television, and commercial work, including Young Phoenix (Honorable Mention, Bantu Film Festival 2023) and the feature docudrama Dithunya tsa Rona. In 2024 he relocated to the Okavango Delta to focus on wildlife filmmaking. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram.