The real story in Queen of Katwe film is in the act, not the acting

What you need to know:

  • From John Aki-Bua to Stephen Kiprotich to all the Ugandans putting in long hours to defy Ugandan stereotype and circumstance, Phiona Mutesi’s story is validation that dreams can come true. If a chess prodigy can rise from amongst the vagabonds in Katwe slum, surely this land and its people can survive the vicissitudes and vagaries of life, our leaders included.
  • The critics and the Box Office might not agree – heck it could be a lousy movie for all I know, but Queen of Katwe wins for what it sets out to do – humanise us – regardless of how well it does it.

The film Queen of Katwe has generated animated debate in Uganda’s online spaces sparked, from the look of things, by a less-than-charitable review by social critic Timothy Kalyegira.

Kalyegira, who has waged an often lonely war against mediocrity for most of his adult life, lasted only 20 minutes into the movie premiere in Kampala. He was withering in his subsequent assessment of the logistics (he was invited by email but wasn’t on the list at the venue) and what he saw of the acting (“simplistic expression, overdone, overstated dialogue”).

Now, before we go any further, your columnist is yet to see the film but I have done something I bet few people have – read the press pack from start to finish, working through the boring details of the homework behind the film.
Now, there are two ways of analysing a film. One way is to see it through the lens of a cinemagoer and the entertainment or educational value it offers. The more trained eye will look out for the plot, the dialogue, the cinematography, the sound and visual effects and the persuasiveness of the cast.
The results of such an assessment are obviously subjective. Some people will enjoy QoK. Others will share Kalyegira’s assessment. There is no correct answer.
A more interesting way is to see films for the sum of their parts, and the bigger ideas and ideals they represent. QoK is based on the real-life story of Phiona Mutesi, a young Ugandan girl in the Kampala slum that gives the film its title, and whose life was transformed when she discovered a unique gift for chess.
Mutesi’s story had already been told in these pages but serendipity helped move the chess pieces in her favour when Tim Crothers wrote about her in January 2011 in ESPN Magazine which is also owned by Disney, the studio that went on to do the film.
This is where it gets interesting. First, the studio could have cast the crew and the location somewhere in Latin America or the Caribbean without cinemagoers in the United States giving a hoot. In fact, some of the locations and crew ended up being South African but Mira Nair, tied to Uganda through her Maisha Film Labs and husband Mahmood Mamdani, tried to cast as many Africans and Ugandans as she could.
It was delightful, thumbing down the list of credits, to identify familiar names involved in acting, photography, production and so on – Ugandans now with coins jingling in their pockets, etched in the footnotes of Hollywood. How pleased I am for them!
Yet this is a lot more than rolling credits and ringing tills. Films about Africa tend to perpetuate a certain predictable narrative of war, disease and destitution. Films that feature Uganda, in particular, tend to feature Idi Amin as an underlying or dominant narrative, be in the Last King of Scotland, or Nair’s own lukewarm 1991 release, Mississippi Masala.
It could be that the acting in the film is unpolished – something to be expected from having so many first-time actors. It could also be that the film struggles at the Box Office – Mississippi Masala grossed $7.3m against costs of $8m; QoK had grossed $2.8m in its second week against costs of $15m.
However, the biggest benefit from QoK is that here is a film that puts forward a truly Ugandan story of hope, of discovery, of small people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, taking on and conquering the world.
It is a reminder that there is more to us than corrupt, power-hungry politicians, hospitals without electricity where doctors operate on patients under torchlight, disease, defiance, destitution and the destruction of dreams.
From John Aki-Bua to Stephen Kiprotich to all the Ugandans putting in long hours to defy Ugandan stereotype and circumstance, Phiona Mutesi’s story is validation that dreams can come true. If a chess prodigy can rise from amongst the vagabonds in Katwe slum, surely this land and its people can survive the vicissitudes and vagaries of life, our leaders included.
The critics and the Box Office might not agree – heck it could be a lousy movie for all I know, but Queen of Katwe wins for what it sets out to do – humanise us – regardless of how well it does it.

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected] &Twitter: @Kalinaki