Finally tracked down a torrent of a documentary I've wanted to see,
Once Upon a Time in Uganda (2021).
It's a dramatic retelling of the story of Wakaliwood, staring the main people who helped put together films like Who Killed Captain Alex and Bad Black together. Namely Isaac Nabwana or Nabwana I.G.G and Alan Hofmanis, a film marketer formerly based in New York.
The story of Wakaliwood starts with Issac's childhood. As a kid, he grew up in the 70s and 80s in a Uganda that was going through a series of terrible civil wars. Idi Amin has forced the British to leave and was purging local ethnic groups. He was ousted in 1979 but this resulted in a
6 year civil war with Yoweri Museveni eventually solidifying as an autocratic dictator, bringing much needed stability. Yoweri still rules today.
Growing up, Issac cites his love of films with Bruce Lee, Arnold, even the Italian Bud Spencer movies. These all inspired him to become a film maker.
So Issac works on his films and in 2010 throws up the trailer for Who Killed Captian Alex on
Youtube. It gets a few million views and Alan in New York sees it. He decides to drop everything and try to find Issac. The Muzungu (Muzungu is a Swahili term for wanderer but is slang for foreigner) eventually finds him in one of the poorest regions in Uganda, in the ghetto of Wakaliga outside Kampala. The conditions of Wakaliga are colonial tier, little running water, frequent power outages, open sewerage ditches, plumbing non-existent. Yet somehow in all this, with the power outages killing his hard drives (Tebaatusasula is another film Issac was working on but is now considered lost media because a power outage killed the drive the footage was stored on), him relying on hand held cameras and CRT monitors and what looks like Windows 7, he somehow works at trying to get together the completed film. With Alan's help, he starts a
kickstarter in 2015 asking for $160 USD to finish the film or 600k Ugandan Shillings. He receives 13K, or 50 million Ugandan Shillings.
From here things just explode, Captain Alex is released for free on
Youtube in 2015. Bad Black, his next film is released in 2016. In 2017, Bad Black is shown for the first time internationally at the
Seattle film festival. And Issac and Wakaliwood are now known internationally, all thanks to Uncle Muzungu.
One of Issac's Goals that he states in the documentary is training the next generation of film makers. That while they live in this era of stability and have an income thanks to the successful kickstarter, he can afford to pay his actors and talent to help grow the local industry. Ramon Film Productions is an actual LLC today, there are child actors in the ghetto that are training in Kung Fu to star in Issac's movies. The
Ugandan film industry is now creating about 200 films per year, some of which have won awards internationally. I'd say he got his wish.
In closing, if you haven't seen a Wakaliwood film, you should.
Captain Alex and
Bad Black are up on Youtube and they're only an hour long. The documentary can be found on any streaming site or through the sketchy YTS site that strangely was a BDrip and came with subs. I'd recommend watching this to see what happens when someone with passion puts something out there and filmmakers support him not out of some "White savior complex" some reviews are saying but because Issac is a fellow film maker and they want to see what he can make when given the proper level of support other film makers in the west have.
I know RLM have mentioned these guys and Issac himself has mentioned Space Cop but I'd still like a proper vid from them on Wakaliwood movies. It's a perfect thing they haven't touched for some reason.
Two more vids, one on the VJ's or Video Jokers. Think of an audio commentary for a movie that's actually funny. The BD releases of Alex and Black both have audio tracks without Emmie and it's a worse experience, he brings so much.
The other is of the prop maker. He made a minigun prop out of scrap metal and a lawnmower engine. It spins.
And the Mad Max looking bike he has at the end.
