Ramon Studio aka Wakaliwood Indian tour 2024
Next stops in the Alliance française of Pune (29 jan. to 2nd feb.) and of Pondicherry (16 feb. to 1st march).
In Wakaliga slum, Isaac Nabwana put Uganda on the cinematic map by shooting $300 action comedies packed with helicopter raids, kung fu, zombies and collective spirit. The dream of Nabwana relied on the vocation of his brother Robert who discovered Kung Fu in Bruce Lee's films, thirty years ago. Mimicking them, he inoculated to Isaac the cinema virus. Isaac understood then that his destiny was cinema. Death, gunshots, victims dying in blood-red geysers are an echo of Isaac’s childhood, when innocence did not prevail in Kampala in the 70s. Idi Amin ruled summoning to the parlor of history fear and murders. Nabwana has not forgotten the swollen corpses discovered in a dump closed to his home nor the soldiers’ raid, nor Bruce Lee… From the magma mixing reality and memory, emerged a unique creator who tells contemporary Uganda. Not the real society, but the one that the commuters feel. Filled with latent violence, garnished, supreme elegance, with humor. The ingredients of Wakaliwood: laughter that allows to cross without affectation, difficult situations. And violence, not Ultra but Meta. This Greek prefix meaning after, beyond, poses what violence is in Wakaliwood's production. Not an end in itself, but a vector to transcend, a grammar that does not give meaning but style, a mirror in which the Ugandan society self-reflects with irony.
