It is a Ugandan story, about Ugandans, and the hero is as Ugandan as you like but maybe we are not used to that. Should the filming have been done in Kololo, and shown flyovers and neat roads? Katwe, where most of the action takes place, is a slum, and is shown as such. I found this strange, and not a little hypocritical. Very few people debated the technical aspects of the film (critics thought it was very well done, many thought there would be an Oscar mention, and rating site Rotten Tomatoes gives it a whopping 93%), but the usual question of how Uganda is depicted by the outside world took centre stage. By then a spirited debate had been going on in the media and on social media, and opinion was divided whether that was the real Uganda depicted in the film. I did not attend the Kampala premiere of Queen of Katwe, and got to watch it months after it started showing.
He strongly felt that Mira Nair was the right person to do it, and so one day when they both happened to be in Kampala, he invited himself over to tea at her house, and told her about the story. It is a real life fairy tale, and it was fitting that it is Disney studios that made it.īut is it the film that Mira Nair wanted to make, all those many years ago? As the story goes, an Executive with Disney Films Tendo Nagenda, whose parents happen to be Ugandan, read Phiona Mutesi’s story in a magazine, and thought it should be made into a film. Roughly fifteen years later, Mira Nair would make Queen of Katwe, about a young Ugandan girl that against all odds rose from living in the slums of Kampala and took on the world, with chess as her vehicle and weapon. She also said then, that one day she would make a film about Uganda she didn’t know what the story would be, or when she would do it, but she intended to show the power and beauty of her adopted home. She spoke of how Kampala reminded her a lot about India, especially the architecture. The two ended up getting married and setting up home in Kampala, where I met them with their then eleven-year-old son, Zohran.
One of the people Nair interviewed as part of her research was Professor Mahmood Mamdani. The girl has India as her spiritual home, but has never been there while Africa is the spiritual home for the American, but who has never been there. So came the story of an Indian family that left Uganda and was living in Mississippi, where the daughter falls in love with an African-American. “I was doing research for my film, and that is why I came here.”Īs she told it, Nair was trying to explore the line that exists between a white world, a black one, and then the one in between, the brown one. In fact, I had never set foot in Africa before,” she said. She told me that she originally came to Uganda to research the film Mississippi Masala. I was assigned to write a feature story about her, and we met at her hilltop home, overlooking Lake Victoria. I first met Mira Nair in 2002, just before Monsoon Wedding had its Kampala premiere. So, she ventured into feature films, with Salaam Bombay as her first. But she soon tired of the struggle to show the documentaries, and the effort to try and get a feedback from whoever watched them. She would go on to make six documentaries, including one about Indian strip-dancers, where she spent two months living with the girls. She went to Harvard to study drama, but found the theatre scene there uninspiring, and so started making documentaries instead. Mira left India as a university student after she was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University, and she has never really gone back (It is said once you attend Harvard you can never really go back to what you were, anyway). Salaam Bombay was seen by many critics as an artistic and spiritual pilgrimage for Nair, paying dues to an India she had left behind. David Oyelowo with the director Mira Nair, center, and Madina Nalwanga on the set of “Queen of Katwe.” Credit Disney It was the first major film in Uganda’s modern history to be filmed in Uganda, and use Ugandans as actors, so it was a real big deal here. In Uganda we first knew her for Mississippi Masala (1991), a story of an Indian girl whose family had to leave Uganda because of (their deportation by) then President Idi Amin. Before Queen of Katwe, Mira Nair was probably better known as the director of the 1988 film Salaam Bombay, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.