Amakula Blog: Day 4

And the Golden Impala goes to...

There is something phantasmagorical about first timers beating favourites. It is a full house in Uganda National Theatre’s auditorium on the closing day [Saturday December 17, 2011] of the festival when Valens Haraburugira & Minani Jean de Dieu’s It Was Not the End is announced this year’s winner of the 7th Golden Impala Award for the Best Short Movie from Eastern Africa. Considering that there are more prolific names on the shortlist, a couple of festival regulars seem surprised.

‘Who are these guys?’ their hesitant clap seems to ask. But Valensa and Minani are not there to answer. According to Doreen Baingana, a renowned Ugandan writer and juror on the panel, the task was not easy. They had to choose a winner from five films of varying theme and genre. Each film had to be considered on its own merits which she says wasn’t easy because they were all good. The other jurors on the panel were Kenya International Film Festival’s Charles Asiba and Tanzanian filmmaker Peter Mbwago. They too agree that the task wasn’t easy but in the end their decision was unanimous.

When the winning film is screened after the award ceremony, the audience is completely taken up by it but a few dissidents suggest that the emotiveness of its subject matters is what swung the vote in its favour. The jurors disagree. According to them, It Was Not the End won because it treated its subject matter best. “In the end we were able to get a full picture of the lead character’s life and it also manages to capture a dying way of life. This gentleman uses his hands for everything and the fact that the film is clear on why this is relevant gives it an upper hand in its treatment of its subject,” says head Golden Impala juror Doreen Baingana. I cannot agree more.

It Was Not the End is a film about triumph. We meet a young man who lost his legs in the war but refused to let this get him down. Insistent of being self-reliant, he acquires land and builds a house with the help of a few benevolent friends, and starts a family and a bee-keeping business he sustains himself. In terms of technique the film opens with a narrative description of his history, and as the narrative continues into the daily aspects of his life, the camera introduces us to his family life, how he goes about his work, and what he and his family do at the end of their day. Although the picture quality is not the best, you have to agree with the judges that it is a good film.

But my pick of the day goes to the afternoon screenings leading up to the dusk closing ceremony. The big attractions were Dan Gordon’s The John Akii-Bua Story: An African Tragedy and Simon Bright’s Robert Mugabe: What Happened? Both documents are expository in character and explorative of what happened to these two African heroes after they had become legends. In The John Akii-Bua Story, we see a young Akii-Bua rising to international glory at the 1972 Munich Olympics to become the first African to win a gold medal in an under 800m track and field event. But Akii-Bua’s Langi tribe is at the receiving end of Idi Amin’s killing machine. And while Amin’s plaudits are noteworthy, Akii-Bua knows the stakes at hand, a lucrative police career notwithstanding. Fearing for his life and that of his family, he choses the path of least resistance to flee into exile. The star that shone so high and bright in the 1972 Olympic sky suddenly disappears into oblivion burnt out by politics both at home and on the global sports arena.

In Robert Mugabe, we see the rise of a widely popular African hero rise to power and then go mad with it. Convinced of his own infallibility, Mugabe the hero turns into an enemy of the people and uses state machinery to keep opposition to his will inconsequential while spinning a pristine propaganda machine that plays him out as a victim of western oppression and not a butcher of his own people. The two documentaries generate a lot of discussion in the auditorium but what I find special about them is that wider context juxtaposing what is happening in Uganda with what is happening in other countries in Africa.

EDGAR KANGERE ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )