When Ugandan action filmmaker Isaac Nabwana lists off some of the great action stars that became a huge personal inspiration, he says names like Bud Spencer, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Lee, but then he says Rambo (as opposed to Sylvester Stallone). The iconography of American Hollywood action cinema is not only in the stars who act in them, but oftentimes the characters themselves and what they do. How they’re perceived by filmgoers as entertainers are not restrained through economic means. Cultural iconography is created, not born or ordained to the elite. That is the essential project behind Wakaliwood, a makeshift “film industry” in the Ugandan rural village of Wakaliga.
Cathryne Czubek’s documentary Once Upon a Time in Uganda takes its audience behind the scenes of Nabwana’s production process, giving insight into the ways he thinks like an artist, a businessman, and a community leader. Czubek chooses to film certain scenes,...
Cathryne Czubek’s documentary Once Upon a Time in Uganda takes its audience behind the scenes of Nabwana’s production process, giving insight into the ways he thinks like an artist, a businessman, and a community leader. Czubek chooses to film certain scenes,...
- 7/7/2023
- by Soham Gadre
- The Film Stage
African cinema may, for most, be top of the blindspot list. The history of filmmaking, distribution, and access to cinema in African countries is contentious: for most of the 20th century Africa as a whole was represented exclusively through the eyes of the nations and kingdoms who colonized it, western filmmakers from Europe and the Americas shaping the world’s opinions of this continent and its artistic contents with their colonialist perspectives. Even ethnographic films (e.g. Jean Rouch), while depicting a more realistic version of various nations such as Nigeria or Cote d’Ivore, bore the outsider’s gaze. That all changed in the 1960s. In his 1983 documentary Camera d’Afrique, Férid Boughedir states that with the release of Ousmane Sembène’s debut short film Borom Sarret in 1963, “for the first time, the image of Africa had come from within.”
Camera d’Afrique, which was presented in a new...
Camera d’Afrique, which was presented in a new...
- 5/6/2021
- by Soham Gadre
- The Film Stage
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