Here, I am surrounded by a myriad of local stories and artists and storytellers, so imagine my surprise that the idea for my new film, Queen of Katwe, a story so local, came to me by way of Hollywood. The mantra of Maisha is “if we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will,” and it is to that end that we have trained almost 650 alumni in the East African countries of Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
#QUEEN OF KATWE SHOWINGS NEAR ME FREE#
It was this skewed version of Africa that led me to start a free film school, Maisha, now 12 years old. In other words, not the Kampala I knew, with all its dignity and style, urban chaos, groups of children in brightly-coloured uniforms crisscrossing the landscape each day like coloured ribbons across its red earth streets. If there were any films made in the West about Africa at all, they were usually bathed in colonial nostalgia, set in unspecific safari lands where giraffes roam, where nameless sculptural warriors stood with spears on twilight horizons, where gin and tonics were served as sundowners as white folk lived their aviatrix/farmer fantasies. With a heart deeply ensconced in independent cinema, and a foot balanced in Hollywood, I saw firsthand the paucity of films being made about this place I came to know and love, its everyday struggles, the remarkable life and beauty of its people. Little did I know then that I would fall in love here, give birth to a son, plant a garden and make Uganda my home for the next 27 years. It was a scary time post-civil War, soldiers and guns and roadblocks, bombed out city streets and bent lampposts with rusty wires reaching out into the sky. I stepped onto the African continent for the first time in 1989 to explore the idea that would become Mississippi Masala, a film about the hierarchy of color and the Asian expulsion by Idi Amin in 1972, starring a young Denzel Washington (“Africa is for Africans…Black Africans”).
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