HAJARA MUSAH CHAMBAS TALKS … ZJILI, GHANA’S KAYAYEI, CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY & STORYTELLING FOR CHANGE

Ghanaian development practitioner, researcher and filmmaker Hajara Musah Chambas makes her feature directorial debut alongside Christine Maame Yaa Boateng with Zjili: A Story of Sisterhood and the Burdens of Excess, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.

Set between northern Ghana and Accra, Zjili follows three women whose lives become intertwined through migration, labour and survival. Inspired by the experiences of Ghana’s kayayei, female head porters working in the country’s markets, the film explores the burdens these women carry, the circumstances that shape their lives and the sisterhood that sustains them.

We caught up with Hajara to discuss the real-life experiences behind Zjili, bringing cultural authenticity to the screen, challenging perceptions of Ghana’s kayayei and why telling their stories means looking beyond individual struggles to the systems that shape their lives.

Please introduce yourself.
My name is Hajara Musah Chambas. I was born in Accra, but I’m a very proud Northern woman. Interestingly, when I go to the North, people sometimes tell me I don’t seem Northern enough, and when I’m in the South, I don’t necessarily fit their idea of what a Southerner is either.

I grew up in Accra, which is such a multicultural and fast-paced environment. Growing up around people from different cultures taught me very early that what feels completely normal to you can seem strange to someone else, and vice versa. You learn about different foods, languages, traditions and ways of living, and I think that made me quite open-minded.

At some point, I started wanting a slower life. During a school exchange programme, I had the opportunity to spend time in Northern Ghana, and I remember thinking that there was something about the pace of life there that really drew me. That eventually influenced my decision to go to university in the North.

I studied Development Education at the University for Development Studies, and that was when I began seeing my own heritage differently. I started paying attention to how women were treated, how hard women worked, and how much society tells women what they are supposed to be.

I’m also naturally quite observant. People sometimes mistake my quietness for not being interactive, but I actually like to absorb things before I speak. I listen, I observe, and I ask questions. I think that is also how I’ve been able to build relationships with people.

Describe your life in one word or one sentence.
Growth. I think my whole life has been about growing through different experiences and being willing to start somewhere.

When I graduated, I wanted to volunteer. I didn’t have this very clear five-year plan. I just knew I wanted experience and I wanted to be useful. Then an opportunity came to work as a translator, and I remember thinking, “I’m not a translator, but I can do this.”

Someone even told me, “You have a degree. You’re supposed to be aiming for something bigger.” But I’ve never really seen things that way. The small things matter to me. I believe the small things accumulate and eventually become something big. That way of thinking has followed me from education to working with women, to research and translation, and eventually to filmmaking.

Throughout all of that, there is one question I keep coming back to: How can I help?

I’m also a strong believer in God, and I think God has directed me in many ways. There have been so many decisions I’ve made without having the full picture. I just trusted that if an opportunity came my way, perhaps it wasn’t only for my benefit. Maybe there was someone else who could benefit from me being there too.

Why are we here?
I think we’re here because African stories deserve to be told by African people. We deserve to tell our own stories, in our own languages, from our own perspectives, and in ways that feel true to the people and communities we come from.

For me, that is important because African stories are often told about us, but we also need to be the people behind the camera, making decisions, shaping the narrative and deciding what parts of our lives we want the world to see.

I didn’t set out thinking I would become a filmmaker. I studied Development Education, worked with women, translated, researched, spent time in communities and listened to people’s stories. Somehow, all of those things led me here.

So I think this is another opportunity to ask that same question I always ask myself: How can I help? Maybe this is one of the ways I’m being given the opportunity to help tell a story that deserves to be told, and to tell it from within the community.

Tell us what Zjili is about in your own words.
Zjili is about three young women whose lives intersect in Accra, but at its heart, I think it is a story about sisterhood and the different things women carry.

The title Zjili means “heavy” in Dagbani, and that heaviness can mean many things. There is the physical weight of the luggage, but there is also responsibility, expectation, grief, survival, love, ambition and the things that keep you going.

Zoya carries ambition. Teiya carries hope. ChalPang is chased by her past. And all three women are trying to navigate life, work, relationships and the circumstances they find themselves in.

But we also wanted to show that these women are not only struggling. They laugh. They dance. They go to the beach. They have dreams. They annoy each other. They support each other. Because that is what being human is. You can be struggling and still have a beautiful moment in the same day.

Where did this story come from?
I didn’t wake up one day and decide that I wanted to make a film about Kai (kayayei). My relationship with this story came much earlier.

I had spent years working with women, including research and translation work with Kai, and the more time I spent with them, the more I realised how much you don’t see if you only encounter them from a distance.

During research, you might be given very simple questions: Where are you from? Do you have a husband? Do you have children? But I would often ask more questions.

A conversation that was supposed to take twenty minutes could become forty minutes because someone would start telling me about her life. Maybe she was divorced, or had children, or something had happened to her. And once someone starts opening up, I think you have to allow them to speak. You can’t just interrupt them because your questionnaire says it’s time for the next question.

After the formal research, I would also go to Old Fadama, sit with the women, spend time with them and just talk. Those small moments actually brought me closer to understanding who they were.

At some point, I thought, we should make a film. I didn’t want to tell one woman’s story exactly as it happened. Fiction gave us the opportunity to bring different women’s experiences together, to look at what kept appearing across their stories and build characters around those shared realities. It was also a way of respecting the stories women had shared with us without making anyone feel that the entire film was simply about them.

Which character is closest to you and how do you see the world?
I don’t think I relate directly to one character.

What I see in Zoya is ambition, not necessarily because I see myself in her desire to become President, but because of what that ambition represents.

For me, her desire to become President is about wanting the women who come after her to have a different life. She doesn’t want other girls to be pushed into early marriage or forced to migrate to Accra to carry loads simply to survive.

I think there is something powerful about believing that the circumstances you’re born into shouldn’t determine who you can become. And that’s something I hope the film gives people permission to do: dream.

Please share a scene or a line that best captures why you agreed to make this film.
One of the things that stays with me is seeing the women come together and think about how they can support each other, improve their lives or change their circumstances. Because that is really what I wanted the film to do.

And then seeing real women watch Zjili and recognise themselves in it, ask questions and have conversations. That is when I think, this is why we made this.

I didn’t want to make something that people simply watched and felt sorry about. I wanted people to see themselves, or see someone they know, and start asking questions.

As first-time directors, how did you decide to share directing duties, and how did that collaboration shape the film?
Christine and I came into the film with very different experiences. She had a background in theatre and the arts, so she brought a different understanding of performance, storytelling and filmmaking. I came from years of working with women, listening to stories, understanding the language and being immersed in the culture.

I was learning how to be a director while directing the film.

One of the biggest things I brought was making sure that the film stayed culturally grounded. Sometimes something can look beautiful on camera, and you think, “This would look really good,” but I would have to come back and say, “No, that’s not actually how people would do this.”

I remember a funeral scene where the setup looked good visually, but it wasn’t culturally accurate. We had to reshoot it because it was important to me that we didn’t make a film about these women while getting fundamental things about their lives wrong.

That was probably one of the biggest conversations between Christine and me: what looks good cinematically versus what is actually true to the culture.

The hardest day was probably the fire scene. There were so many people, crowd control was difficult, it was late, and everything felt overwhelming. But it was also exciting because I had experienced the fire festival when I went back North for school. So recreating something that was familiar to me was chaotic and beautiful at the same time. And honestly, filmmaking taught me a lot about myself. Film will test your last bit of patience.

Sisterhood emerges as a key source of resilience. How deliberate was that choice?
Very deliberate, but also very real.

When women come to Accra, many of them don’t know anyone. They might not know the language, the city or how things work. So they often look for someone who looks familiar, a particular colour of clothing, a scarf, someone speaking their language, and they ask, “Where are you from?”

If you find out that someone is from your town or community, that can immediately create a connection. You might start working together, eating together, sleeping in the same place or helping each other. And eventually, strangers become family.

One of the things that really stayed with me about Kai is that even when someone has had a bad day and hasn’t made money, there is often another woman who is willing to help her. They understand that she still needs to eat, bathe and get through the night. They are surviving themselves, but they still make room to help someone else survive. That’s sisterhood.

And that’s also why the laughter and dancing are important. Why remove those parts and leave the entire film about suffering? They’re human beings. They have happy moments too.

What responsibility did you feel in portraying these realities without sensationalising suffering?
A huge responsibility.

Because I’ve worked closely with these women, I don’t see them as an issue or a statistic. I know that these are people’s lives.

One thing I think people consistently get wrong about Kai is that they see them as very strong. They carry these enormous loads, so people assume they must be incredibly strong. But they’re not machines. They’re human beings. They get tired. They get exhausted. They’re in pain. A lot of what looks like strength is actually survival. They’re living within a cycle of poverty and doing what they know to do because they may not have had access to education, skills or other opportunities.

I remember during the chiropractic research, a mother was lying on the chiropractor’s bed to have her pain treated. When her child heard the sound of the bed and thought something was happening to his mother, he became frightened and started crying. I was holding the child, and I remember thinking about that bond between a mother and her child, and the fact that the work she was doing to survive could also put both of them at risk.

That stayed with me. At the same time, we didn’t want to make a film that simply says, “Look at these women suffering.” We wanted to look at the systems around them too.

Language was also very important. The film moves between Dagbani, Twi and English, and those aren’t just technical choices. Language carries identity, relationships and culture.

For me, because I understand the language and the culture, I was constantly listening for those small things: the way people speak to each other, expressions, gestures, food, clothing, how people interact. We wanted people watching from the North to feel that we had made an effort to get those things right.

What conversations are you hoping Zjili sparks?
I hope it makes people ask: What choices are actually available to a young woman?

Especially with clothing, there is an entire chain: production, consumption, what happens when people no longer want something, where it ends up, who handles it and who ultimately carries the consequences.

If you’re a producer, you have to think about the entire life of the product you make. If you’re telling people to put clothes into a recycling box, you also have to ask where those clothes actually go.

The secondhand clothing trade in Ghana also has a much longer history than people sometimes realise. Families have built businesses around it for generations, and people depend on it to survive. So I think the conversation has to go beyond blaming one person. We have to look at the entire cycle.sation has to go beyond blaming one person. We have to look at the entire cycle.

How did you cast and direct the actors to achieve that level of immersion?
We were very intentional about bringing people from the community into the film.

Zara, who plays Cheo Pang, is someone who is very connected to the community. There are parts of Cheo Pang where Zara isn’t really “performing” in the traditional sense. She’s bringing something of herself into the character.

We also worked with the Adamok drama community and the Northern Drama and Film Association, as well as other Northern actors through the casting process.

Some of the people in the film are real Kai. So in some ways, they weren’t trying to learn how to become someone else. They were bringing their own experiences, language and understanding into the film. That was really important to us. We didn’t want to make a film where everyone was pretending to be from the community. We wanted to bring the community into the film and allow them to bring something of themselves with them.

We often ask why women migrate. But I think we should also ask what would make staying home a viable choice.

What happens when a girl doesn’t have access to education? What opportunities become unavailable to her? What happens when she’s expected to marry early? What happens when there aren’t enough economic opportunities? What happens when the only way she knows to support herself is to migrate and carry loads?

And then, once she gets to the city, what are her working conditions? What does constant survival do to someone emotionally?

I also want people to think about the systems around these women, not just the individual woman. There are producers. There are consumers. There are governments. There are communities. There are institutions. There are economic systems.

I want us to ask questions about all of those things rather than looking at one woman and asking, “Why doesn’t she just do something else?”

Sometimes the question is not why she doesn’t leave. The question is: What alternatives have we actually given her?

For audiences who may only know Kai as the women carrying luggage in Accra markets, what do you most want them to take away?
I want them to see the woman before they see the luggage.

Before she is Kai, she is someone’s daughter. She might be someone’s sister, someone’s mother, someone’s friend. She has ambitions. She has fears. She has jokes. She has people she loves. She has things she wants to become.

The luggage is visible. The woman carrying it is often made invisible. And I think that is what I hope Zjili changes, even just a little bit.

I don’t want people to look at these women and only think about their struggles. I want them to see their humanity. Because they are not machines. They are women. They are human beings. They get tired, they dream, they love, they laugh, they hope, and they keep going.

And maybe the most important thing is that their lives are connected to all of ours in ways we don’t always see. That’s where I keep coming back to that question: How can I help?

For me, Zjili is one attempt to ask that question through storytelling.

Zjili had its World Premiere at  ‪@TIFF‬  September 2026