Once Upon A Time In Uganda

“It’s like our Hollywood, but better,” says Isaac Nabwana. He’s speaking of Wakaliwood, the film industry hub which he has almost single-handedly created in his home district of Wakaliga on the outskirts of Kampala. Isaac loves cinema, especially action cinema, and when making bricks for a living he was constantly inventing films in his head, so he decided to buy a camera and make them for real. In the 11 years leading up to the release of this documentary, he made 47.

Clips from those films suffuse this one. They are not polished, by any means, but they are at least on a par with the output of Western studios like Asylum, and they’re a whole lot more fun. When films are made on a shoestring budget, passion and ambition go a long way towards making them enjoyable. Every one of Isaac’s action comedies is a labour of love. He has a natural eye for good framing and a continually inventive approach – and the more he makes, the more skilled he and his crew become. That includes his wife, who explains that she had to become a filmmaker too because it was the only way to be around him.

In Uganda, as Isaac explains, cinemas belong to the middle classes, not really accessible to people from the slums. The DVD market, however, is huge, sustained in significant part by bootleg foreign films narrated by VJs – ‘video jokers’ – who translate the dialogue and throw in a few jokes (even if the film was originally a tragedy). Like people anywhere, though, Ugandans – including the urban poor – want to see themselves on film. Wakaliwood fills that niche. Isaac’s films are sold in the streets and door to door by the people who star in them. Sometimes the first one is free, because the team knows that most viewers will start craving more. Isaac has an instinct for what his audience wants which Hollywood moguls would kill for.

Inevitably, some of his films have found fans outside the country. One of those is Alan Hofmanis, a New Yorker who made it his mission to turn Isaac into an international household name, and it’s his journey which this film follows. As luck would have it, Alan arrived in Wakaliga just as the ‘beating up the white person’ subgenre was taking off, but Isaac didn’t know any white people he could get to star. Having intended to present a business opportunity,. Alan was quickly recruited as a star. His ‘baptism’, as he put it, came when he fell face first into raw sewage during a fight scene. “Alan makes a good sound when he’s dying, so they like him. They like that sound,” says Isaac, explaining his appeal as they prepare for a shoot. “Tonight we’re going to kill Alan.”

The kind of films which international funding agencies want to make about Uganda focus on poverty and hardship and wide-eyed children dreaming of a better life. Isaac makes films about cannibal tribespeople kidnapping white people and cooking them. He’s magnificently off-message and much sharper than people expect, this easy going man with his deep love of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. If he agrees to Alan’s international plans, he will do so on his own terms. Meanwhile, he has a production team building a helicopter out of scrap and a sizeable team of Waka Starz, young children in training to become the filmmakers and actors of the future.

A film which will remind its viewers why they fell in love with cinema in the first place, Once Upon A Time In Uganda is also the triumphant story of a group of people transforming their own lives and their community without needing help from outside. it’s as smart as it is entertaining. One word of caution: don’t leave, or turn it off, before the credits. There’s a great montage of killing scenes playing as they roll.