Polish filmmaker Maciej Bochniak is developing The Lawyer, a new feature documentary following the extraordinary case of Brian Mwenda, a Kenyan man who reportedly passed himself off as a lawyer, built a reputation in Nairobi’s legal circles and became a national controversy after his real credentials were called into question.
The project, currently in development, is being produced by Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska and Kinga Tasarek, with cinematography by Kyalo Thomas. It was previously presented at MIA Market in 2025 and is now among the projects selected for Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session, where it is seeking sales agents, broadcasters, festivals and VoD platforms.
At the centre of the film is a figure who seems almost too improbable for fiction. According to the project materials, Mwenda was known for taking on difficult cases: defending a man suspected of links to organised crime, representing a motorcycle rider framed for vehicular manslaughter, and helping a local water carrier avoid jail time for a theft he had not committed. He won case after case, rose to become a partner at a law firm and emerged as a rising star of the Kenyan legal circuit.
Then came the twist. After Mwenda reportedly won a seemingly impossible case before a military tribunal in Nairobi, questions began to surface. The official story, as presented by the film, is that he had never completed law school and had fabricated his biography, effectively creating the persona of a lawyer as an actor might prepare for a role.
The project describes him as having learned law from YouTube and court procedure from the TV series Boston Legal. His story made headlines in Africa, Europe and the United States, becoming both a meme and a scandal — one that exposed possible weaknesses in the Kenyan justice system while provoking a more uncomfortable question: if he really won 26 cases, then where is the fraud?
Bochniak does not seem interested in treating the story as a simple tale of deception. In his director’s statement, he says he was struck first by Mwenda’s audacity and by the class dimension of the case: a young man outside the elite pathways of legal education who decided to force his way into a world that would otherwise remain closed to him.
“The story of Brian Mwenda fascinated me from the very first moment I read about it,” Bochniak says. “Here was a young man who had the courage to risk his future by challenging the world and going against the current.”
The director immediately connects Mwenda’s story to pop-cultural fantasy. The obvious reference is Suits, in which a brilliant young man who never finished law school successfully pretends to be a lawyer. But what interests Bochniak is not only the resemblance to fiction, but the way Mwenda appears to have built a full professional role for himself through performance, confidence, knowledge and nerve.
“Brian built his legal résumé by openly entering the professional legal world, combining acting talent with legal skill,” Bochniak says. “This, too, is an essential part of this thrilling story.”
The doc will follow the fall-out from Mwenda’s exposure, including the backlash from other lawyers and the support he received from former clients who praised his talent and human approach. He has since been arrested and now faces a court hearing, giving the project an unresolved dramatic arc: the alleged impostor who once navigated the legal system through self-taught skills must now confront that same system as he fights for his future.
For Bochniak, the central question is not whether Mwenda lied — the film clearly recognises him as a con artist — but what his lie reveals about contemporary ambition, social mobility, ego, usefulness and the hunger to become someone else.
“At the same time, we must not forget that despite all his positive qualities and the influence he had on his clients’ lives, Brian is, above all, a phenomenal con artist,” the director says. “He fooled not only everyone around him, but also himself.”
That tension is likely to shape the film’s tone. The Lawyer is positioned as a documentary with the energy of a legal thriller, but also as a psychological portrait of a man who may have believed his own fiction. The story raises questions about professional gatekeeping, institutional failure, charisma and the increasingly blurred line between performance and identity.
A more personal layer has also entered the project. Bochniak says his relationship with Mwenda began to change as he watched recorded material, Zoom conversations and WhatsApp messages, and recognised in the protagonist’s fears something connected to his own experiences.
“I was drawn to Brian’s story because, in a certain way, I had lived it myself — due to my own diagnosed impostor syndrome,” he says. “That is why listening to the successive stages of Brian’s great deception resonated so deeply within me.”
The director adds that, when he bailed Mwenda out of prison for the fourth time, he realised he was becoming more personally involved than he had expected. That connection is now part of the film’s emotional terrain, opening up the possibility of a double portrait: one of the Kenyan protagonists fighting his legal battle, and another of a filmmaker confronting his own attraction to a story about fraud, talent and self-invention.
Bochniak is a writer-director and a member of the Polish Directors’ Guild. He won the Perspektywa Award, named after Janusz “Kuba” Morgenstern, for Disco Polo, which drew nearly one million viewers to Polish cinemas in under six weeks. He also won the Złoty Pazur at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia for Magnezja, while his Netflix feature Freestyle reached the platform’s Top 10 in over 20 countries and screened in Gdynia’s main competition.
He has also directed feature-length documentaries including One Billion Happy People and Ethiopiques: Revolt of the Soul, both HBO productions. With The Lawyer, he returns to non-fiction through a story that combines courtroom drama, media scandal and a contemporary crisis of identity.
The film is planned as an 80-minute Poland-France-Belgium co-production, with a total budget of €411,000 and €176,744 already confirmed from the Polish Film Institute. Delivery is slated for January 2028.
