A NEW HOPE: WELCOME TO WAKALIWOOD!

The miracle of Wakaliwood began about seven years ago. At that time the trailer for the Ugandan action film WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX went viral on the Internet. Martial arts battles in wooden shacks, fountains of pixel-blood, and toy helicopters in front of green-screen CG worlds transported a maximum of backyard romanticism, while the voice-over promised, in best Schwarzenegger idiom, AKTSCHN. The film to the trailer, which was released in 2010, was hardly seen by anyone in the west, however. Produced and directed by Isaac Nabwana aka Nabwana IGG in the slums of Wakalinga in the Ugandan capital Kampala, the lusty DIY hit had virtually no chance of being shown outside Africa. This changed when a friend showed the trailer for WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX to Alan Ssalis Hofmanis, to cheer him up two days after his girlfriend had left him. Hofmanis was so enthusiastic that he took the next flight he could get in the direction of Uganda. He wanted to be a bridge-builder to the west for Nabwana’s Ramon Film Productions – and somehow he actually succeeded, even though most film festivals rejected the ultra-violence in the films and recommended producing something more like de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES instead. Fortunately, Isaac Nabwana was not deterred by such dubious suggestions: the SUPA ACTION of his films pays respects more to the Eastern of the Far East and western tough-guy icons like Van Damme and Chuck Norris. All the Wakaliwood works, by the way, are narrated over and commented on by VJ-Emmie, who thus follows the worthy tradition of the Video Jokers, who translate all foreign films live in Ugandan cinema halls – usually back rooms with a middle-sized television – and add local color and their own ideas and interpretations.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS:

BAD BLACK, Sa, 23.09. | 01:00 – Filmcasino