Edwin Nuwagaba
28 September 2008
opinion
Most evenings as you walk downtown, there is a truck selling a new Ugandan movie on the streets. The truck, decorated with posters of the new film, moves at a very slow pace as the deejay atop, through the huge speakers, showers it with praises.
Behind it are young girls selling DVDs to passersby. Some will stop and buy, while others will ignore them and keep moving. These DVDs usually go for Shs5000.
Local filmmakers, despite their limited skills are producing many movies these days - it takes one only a few weeks and they will have produced a full length feature film. You don't need to have gone to a film school to realise that they are greatly wanting; the stories are half baked, the characters are not that convincing, and the films themselves look like an attempt of stage actors and actresses to get captured on video.
Here are some of the tittles that these movies go by; Akabenje Mu Ssomero, Too Late, Mukyala Mugerwa, Ekyekango, Abakyala Baagalakyi?, Nyamba Nkuyambe and so many others. Most of these titles are not catchy at all, perhaps predicting the content that lies therein. While financial constraints are the most significant of the stumbling blocks to our film industry, Michael Wawuyo, an actor and costume designer, says that the current filmmakers have refused to accept their ignorance about filmmaking and have continuously made the same mistakes.
"These movies are so under-produced and poorly directed, they are driven by blind illusions of film money," he says. "There is a group of producers who are churning out storylines they get from mediocre screenplay writers and selling them to themselves.
The stories are raw and the filmmakers are even breaking all the rules that there has ever been in filmmaking; for instance the films have so many backlights, the colour balancing is poor, camera focus is poor, basically everything is wrong. These guys should go back to school for proper hands-on. They should not get their amateur stage experience and drag it onto the screen yet they are actually dramatists."
Wawuyo has a point. The theatre industry currently lies in a crisis; having recycled the same old plays, the audience has lost interest that these days if you went into theatres, the auditoriums are almost empty. So, theatre practitioners are now opting for film, but they have simply imported their stage experience onto the screen, yet screen and stage are totally different.
While the industry still lies in such turmoil, with the filmmakers themselves not knowing what to do, downtown film producers and a few of these filmmakers, instead of concentrating on improving the quality of their work, have organised a film awards event - Uganda Film Award.
Mariam Ndagire is a stage actress and director who recently premiered her maiden film Down This Road I Walk says the industry is progressing, though with a number of challenges along the way.
"The industry is promising and has got talent but the main limitation is that we are not equipped with the technicalities of the game; like the dos and don'ts, we are just guessing our way out," she says. She adds: "though they are not all that good, at least we have a number of Ugandan movies on the market - something is better than nothing.
We are not doing a lot of things well but we are getting together to help one another out, for example I have lots of books about writing and directing for screen and I am lending these books to all those UFN (Uganda Film Network) members who are aspiring writers and directors," she says.
But Matt Bish (Matthew Bishanga) the maker of Battle of the Souls, a local upcoming filmmaker and also a film graduate at S.A.E School of Audio Engineering and Film in Amsterdam, stresses the need for filmmakers to get an education about filmmaking before they actually embark on the practice.
"School is necessary whether you like it or not because to become good at something you need to learn the ABCs. You need to know the rules so you can learn how to break them. But you cannot break rules you don't even know in the first place.
People claim that they are making film but they have no clue, they need to understand what film is, by going to school," he says, before adding that Uganda doesn't have schools yet, but if filmmakers can pick literature anywhere, at least to try to understand what film is, that would probably be a good start for now.
His worry though is that most of the local filmmakers today are targeting money instead of building a strong foundation where local films can be appreciated even on the international market.
Battle of the Souls, his maiden movie, at the beginning of this year was premiered in Hollywood on February 16, 2008 and February 18 at Crenshaw Boulevard during the Pan African Film Festival.
It is from here, because of its thematic concern, that it was invited to Verona Film Festival in Italy (a country known for horror and Christian movies) by the festival director, Fabrizio Colombo. The movie also received a special mention for Best East African Film at KIFF (Kenya International Film Festival).
While Bishanga stresses the need for these filmmakers to learn the ABCs of film, Joseph Mabirizi Busulwa, the writer, director and producer of Mukyala Mugerwa and Sophia the Girl Child, confessed to me that he is not good at reading. He is happy though, simply because he has managed to produce some movies.
"The problem is that no one is giving us good money for our movies though I think this is the fastest growing industry in the country. We are trying to make a lot more movies and I think that is a step. Before, we would shoot for only two weeks, but now we are shooting for about 30 to 40 days and we now rehearse for even more days than before. I think we are slowly progressing," he says.
Mabirizi blames the failure to produce quality movies on the absence of standard equipment. It is for this reason, he says, that they can't perfect the simplest special effects and even control the ambience on location.
That said however, there are simple things that local filmmakers undermine that would not necessarily need money. For instance one does not need money to write a rich story; give it a good dramatic structure, create believable characters and create needs and goals for them so as to generate crisis.
A number of movies out there are shot at wrong hours and that's why they have too much sunlight and many shadows in them. Most scenes take too long and overlap each other without harmony. The directing is totally poor, the endings are rushed.
And worst of all most of these movies depend entirely on dialogue, yet film is a visual expression whose story is told by pictures. In Abakayala Bagalakyi, because the director wanted this man to look like an old man, he smeared him with chalk and one could see that this character was simply faking a role. Most of the characters in our local movies look like they have just come to work and go away; there is totally no life breathed into their roles.
Mpinga, who recently premiered his second movie Enkwezenge, says that the industry is trying though the audience has too many expectations. "Most people think that to make a good movie there must be some nudity in it, but that is against our culture.
In my movie for instance, I don't show people bathing, though the whites would do it. When it comes to love, people think that characters must kiss but you can portray love in a different way," he says.
Unlike films coming out from Hollywood or Bollywood, there is no style that cuts across in our local movies. People wake up one day and do their own thing, leaving our local movies with no identity.
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