Coffee Connects Across Continents
A new, student-made documentary, “Ikawa: Coffee That Connects,” will première at this year’s Maine International Film Festival. The 18-minute film explores how a cup of coffee can create surprising connections between Waterville, Maine, where the cup is sold, and Kigali, Rwanda, where the beans are grown, harvested, and distributed globally.
Fittingly, “Ikawa” is an international co-production, a collaboration between the Maine Film Center, Mid-Maine Technical Center, and Rwanda’s Mashariki African Film Festival. Two distinct crews of student filmmakers, one in Waterville and one in Kigali, worked concurrently to plot the global journey of the coffee and the dozens of people.
The film “beautifully reflects what happens when art, agriculture, culture, and community come together,” said Churchill Elangwe-Preston, who is featured in the film. Elangwe-Preston grew up in a coffee-growing community in Cameroon before moving to Maine and founding Mbingo Mountain Coffee, an importer and roaster of ethically sourced African coffee beans. “It tells a story that begins with farmers at origin and continues here in Waterville, reminding us that true collaboration can turn a local cup of coffee into a global conversation,” he continued.
Mid-Maine Tech and Waterville High School Class of 2025 students Brenden Beckwith, Ally Dorval, and Louis Williams composed the Waterville team. Under the guidance of media instructor Dave Boardman and with support from the Maine Film Center, the trio made some unexpected discoveries about the world and their hometown’s place in it.
“Supporting a local operation means supporting all the people who put work into it,” said Beckwith. “This is their life. I didn’t understand the whole story myself until we put it together. It was surprising seeing how people can connect through coffee. In the film, we see the different lifestyles of farmers, shipment workers, familiar faces here in Waterville, all connected.”
In Kigali, Rwandan student filmmakers Fabrice Imanizabayo, Delice Ingabire, Cedric Shimwa, and Mudjahid Simpenzwe worked with Mashariki African Film Festival founder Trésor Senga to spotlight their local community’s role in the global framework.
“Through coffee, ‘Ikawa’ tells a much larger story about Rwanda: resilience, craftsmanship, community, and the people whose lives are connected through every cup,” said Imanizabayo, cinematographer of the Rwanda unit. “My hope is that audiences in Rwanda feel pride in the country’s coffee heritage, while audiences in the U.S. gain a deeper understanding of the labor, artistry, and lives behind each cup. The film invites people to slow down, listen, and recognize coffee not just as a commodity, but as a story of human connection.”
In November 2025, Beckwith, Dorval, and Williams traveled to Rwanda with Boardman and Maine Film Center executive director Mike Perreault to meet their filmmaking partners and screen a work-in-progress cut at Mashariki. This festival also presented the first opportunity for the two filmmaking teams to finally meet up in person, after nearly completing the film as distinct creative units.
“Working on a film with people I’ve never met and that live thousands of miles away was a bit of a challenge,” Dorval said. “The main thing while putting the whole film together was making sure that we didn’t take any creative freedom away from the other group. What makes this project special was the fact that it was made by two separate groups, living across the globe, and we never met each other until the premiere. Having our documentary premiere at an international film festival was such an incredible opportunity and I will be forever grateful to everyone that played a part in helping it happen.”
The Maine International Film Festival will present the world première of the completed film at the Waterville Opera House at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 12, 2026. Sponsored by the Mid-Maine Global Forum, admission to the screening is free. A reception with the Waterville filmmakers, Senga, and other guests — plus plenty of coffee — will follow the screening.
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