The Pearl of Africa tells the story of Cleopatra Kambugu, a 28 year old Ugandan transgender woman. Born biologically male, she is transitioning into the woman she knows she was born to be, in one of the most transphobic places in the world. Forced to leave her country and loving boyfriend behind, she sets out to fight for her right to love, and against all odds, to become the first accepted trans person in Uganda.
From her warm demeanour and disarming smile, you wouldn’t know how dangerous life is for Cleopatra Kambugu. After being outed on the front page of the biggest tabloid in Kampala, in a country with some of the world’s most bigoted anti-LGBT laws (including a notorious bill threatening life imprisonment for homosexuality), her relationship with long-term boyfriend Nelson is tested. Forced to flee to Kenya to escape reprisals, Cleo begins the process of navigating a difficult bureaucracy to reconcile with her partner.
The Pearl of Africa follows its main character as she seeks to shine light on the intricate concepts of gender and identity, bringing viewers into a Ugandan community whose existence has been shrouded in myth and prejudice. A moving and universal love story captured in the face of extreme circumstances, this unforgettable documentary urgently reveals the consequences of Uganda’s anti-LGBT laws.
Directed and produced by: Jonny von Wallström
Country: Sweden
Year: 2016
Runtime: 90′
www.roughstudios.com
On Friday 27 March, the Frontline Club partnered with the London School of Economics to host a series of films for the 7th annual LSE Literary Festival. The external screening, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was packed out with members of the public for a night of short films exploring the foundations of identity and place. The five films took the audience on a journey to far flung corners of the earth, from rural Turkey to the Arctic Circle. While striking in their different visual styles, each shared a common thread by providing intimate snapshots of the lives of displaced individuals, traumatised and trapped in alien landscapes.
“You have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go,” whispers Habib Aydin as he captures a wild bird in a crude wooden cage on the outskirts of his village in south-east Turkey. This is one of the most symbolic scenes in Reber Dosky’s The Call, which follows the story of Habib and his determination to call his only son Ramazan back to settle in the village they fled in 1989. While Habib returned 7 years ago to remarry, his first family remained in Istanbul. “What does this village have to offer?” Ramazan asks during a short visit to see his father. Habib replies: “animals, rocks… what does it not have?” Touched with humour and a soundtrack of birdsong and bleating goats, Dosky presents a story about loss of tradition across a generational divide, where the disconnect between love of family and land is felt keenly.
Xenos, a short by Mahdi Fleifel, follows a group of impoverished Lebanese youths trapped in Greece which is in the grip of economic disaster. Their hopeless existence unfolds in a telephone conversation, played over shots of streets lined with drug addicts cowering in shuttered shop porches. The camera is grainy and uncomfortably intrusive, reflecting the desperate measures they take for money to buy hard drugs. “I’ve tried to mingle with the Greeks,” one youth says, “but when you do, they assume you are gay. They say ‘you want sex?’” Speaking of how they sell their bodies to strangers in a nearby park, another reflects. “This country ruins your soul.”
Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla offers a different perspective of the conventional refugee narrative in Two at the Border, by focusing on the plight of two smugglers stationed at the Turkish city of Edirne near Greece. Ali, from Syria, and Naser, from Palestine, form a strong bond through their shared financial hardship and longing for home. “I thought about returning to Palestine,” Naser admits in the confines of his apartment. “My parents are seriously ill. They cry on the phone for me to come home. I haven’t been able to send a single lira back.” Stuck in their own limbo, their lives consist of traversing the distance between their apartment and the heavily patrolled borders.
In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Morgan Knibbe’s Shipwreck is a testament to the horrors faced by those who resort to crossing into Europe by sea. The camera sways and lurches as hundreds of coffins are loaded onto a military ship at the harbour. Between the hysteria and silence of loss, one survivor, Abraham, whispers his story as he walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks.
In the last film of the evening, Adrift, Frederik Jan Depickere follows the story of Simu, a Ugandan who fled political persecution. He now works as a construction site cleaner 150km above the Arctic Circle. With all his family dead or missing, Simu stares out over the ghostly tundra landscape. “I used to dream of being a pop singer,” he says. “But according to my situation now, I think that dream is dead.” The camera pans over a field of snow peppered with bare black trees. “I don’t belong here. But at home they would just make me disappear.”
For more information on the LSE Literary Festival 2015, click here.
]]>“Where can I go to have a decent life?”
On Friday 11 June, Shorts at the Frontline Club took viewers on a cinematic journey that showcased the different ways used to document the world we live in.
The theme: migration and the phases of migration.
Two at the Border by Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla shone a light onto the lives Ali and Nasser. The two friends attempt to make ends meet by helping refugees to the Turkish-Greek border. Ali is Palestinian, traumatised by the violence he has witnessed. “Problems, problems everywhere,” he repeats with bloodshot eyes.
“Where can I go to have a decent live?” Ali asks the universe.
As if replying to Ali, Europe’s response to the rising number of refugees has been increased militarisation of the Greece–Turkey border. The film is dedicated to Naser, who attempted to smuggle himself into Greece. The boat he was on allegedly capsized in the Aegean Sea, and he has been missing ever since.
What can await those who make it across the border to Greece? Xenos documents the desperation of Abu Eyad, whose departure from the Palestenian refugee camp Ain el-Helweh in Lebanon was the subject of Mahdi Fleifel’s award-winning documentary A World Not Ours (2012). Xenos is narrated through a telephone conversation between the two childhood friends. Slowly the reality of life across the border becomes apparent to Mahdi as a bitter nightmare of depression, heroin addiction, sex with men for money and the impossibility of seeing their families again.
The Source by Marcin Sauter spirited the audience to Nagorno-Karabakh, illustrating what it’s like to stay where everyone else has left. The black and white film projected a stylised impression of trauma and loneliness felt by a woman who stayed where no one else could. In a village destroyed and deserted by war.Separation and acute loneliness continued in the film Adrift by Frederik Jan Depickere. We listened to Simu’s story against the stark, industrial visuals of the Arctic. Simu dreamt of becoming a pop singer. In life, his father was tortured to death for founding the anti-government UPF. His older brother suffered the same fate. Simu’s mother disappeared. His sister died of HIV as they were being smuggled from Uganda. He cannot return. As he shovels the snow, he thinks his dream is dead.
The final film of the evening broke slightly from the theme of migration and touched more upon identity. What happens when one plays for a national team and the political context of what you represent changes? The Opposition by Ezra Edelman and Jeffrey Plunkett chronicles the events around the qualification play-off games for the 1974 World Cup between Chile and the USSR. Chilean football players were faced with a choice between staying part of the US-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s charade, or using one’s privileged position to represent the oppressed.
Whether directly linked to migration or not, all the films explored the human struggle to live. To live a decent life in dignity.
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On Monday 15th April, the Dutch Embassy and Time magazine partnered to co-organise a screening at the Frontline Club of Peace vs Justice: a documentary about the violence of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), particularly against children, in northern Uganda. An expert panel discussion followed.
Klaartje Quirijns (left), Geoffrey Robertson (centre left), Matthew McAllester (centre right), Mugambi Kiai (right) Photo: Jim Treadway
Directed by Klaartje Quirijns, Peace vs. Justice explores how to find justice for Kony, and peace for Uganda, where three million people have been victimized by the LRA, either directly or indirectly, according to the film’s closing credits.
If Kony is captured (one hundred U.S. Special Operations troops were dispatched toward this end in Central Africa last year ), the film asks: should his crimes be placed solely into the hands of local justice in Uganda? “The people I met in northern Uganda…actually most people…will say that,” Quirijns told the audience.
The movie highlights however that Ugandans have failed to achieve peace with the LRA for over two decades.
Many hope to see Kony tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands, yet panelist and British barrister Courtenay Griffiths was sceptical:
“If you look at virtually every situation in which the ICC are involved, you can see certain Western interests at play. And what you have to realize is that the language of human rights, and humanitarian intervention, has now become a fig leaf behind which powerful Western countries can intervene around the world to protect their own, particularly economic, interests.”
Courtney Griffiths (left), Barney Afako (centre), Klaartje Quirijns (right) Photo: Jim Treadway
Was Griffiths right to doubt the ICC’s intentions? asked moderator Matthew McAllester.
“No,” human rights lawyer and fellow panelist Geoffrey Robertson affirmed. The ICC has brought both hope and fear that war crimes will not be tolerated, he emphasized.
“You can’t say it’s a neocolonial court,” he added. “Yes, we won’t probably get [Tony] Blair. Although Dr. Kissinger’s travel plans are very curtailed. So are George Bush’s. There are a lot of places they can’t go to. Why? Because of international justice.”
Finally, Mugambi Kiai, a professional advocate for accountability in African governance, demanded a change in the conversation about Kony, Uganda, and the ICC:
]]>“When is it that we stop looking at the ICC as a panacea? As the vehicle through which we get justice? … Where are the domestic remedies that we so need? [In Kenya,] we’ve been told: we’ve got a new judiciary, we’ve got a new constitution. That’s all hogwash!
They’re not doing enough to transform the political conversation that transforms all of these historical injustices into good governance, into a political method that respects rights, respects values, respects dignity. That is not the conversation that’s going on, and that’s a tragedy.”
You can watch the discussion below:
On 1 November, the Frontline Club screened the powerful and evocative documentary about the human rights of Uganda’s gay and lesbian population, Call Me Kuchu, followed by a Q&A.
David Kato, the most prominent leader for sexual equality rights in Uganda, is the focus of this extraordinary documentary filmed during the last year of his life – until his murder in January 2011.
The film exposes the level of public fear and hatred towards the LGBT community, and how this embattled community reacted. One popular tabloid headline read:
“Homos giving support to Kony, ADF and Al-Shabaab”.
This vitriolic expression of hatred, linking Kuchus to terrorism and brutal atrocities, distinctly highlights the level of public outrage at ‘unnatural’ behaviour, and the popular support behind the recurring anti-homosexual legislation. A ‘Kuchu’ is a discriminatory acronym for a homosexual in Uganda.
Filmmakers Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall first came across the specifics of Ugandan homophobia laws after hearing of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) activist Victor Mukasa’s legal victory against the Ugandan Attorney General over police harassment.
That a member of this repressed and discriminated community could win such a case, showing surprising judicial independence, piqued their interest which led to this compelling film’s creation.
Naome Ruzindana, a friend and colleague of Kato’s, answered questions with Fairfax Wright and Zouhali-Worrall after the screening. Discussing the bill she said it has been on and off due to Ugandan elections and its legislative reintroduction:
“But now it’s going to be passed, the bill is definitely criminalising homosexuals.”
Asked about the root cause of Uganda’s extreme homophobia, it became clear that as a law it has survived from the British colonial era into the modern day.
Most tellingly it has become the frontline of Bible-belt American pastors in the fight against homosexuality. Fairfax Wright said:
“Pastors feel they have lost the battle in places like the US so are trying to nip it in the bud, in places like Uganda.”
Later on in the discussion she added:
“Churches that have the most power [in Uganda] are the ones that happen to be the most right wing, the most LGBT non-affirming.[….] But on the other hand these pastors [….] have only recently started coming [to Uganda].”
Among the different topics addressed during the discussion, audience questions focussed on how to change a whole people’s mentality from both a top-down and a bottom-up approach.
The international community toes a challenging line between offering aid and demanding reform. Rousing support for the LGBT cause is difficult when a clause of the new legislation states even knowing of a homosexual’s ‘abnormality’ causes guilt by association and liability for a three year prison term.
“The fear is that if they’re doing it now [supporting the gay community] what happens when the bill passes and there’s evidence of them aiding and abetting the gay community. So, people are very hesitant to put their stamp of approval on the gay community because it may come back to haunt them and prevent them from doing the other work that they’re also there to do.” said Fairfax Wright.
Finally a question was raised, asking if the filmmakers set out to make a film about activism or an activist film, especially related to their journalism background. Fairfax Wright replied:
“If we are making a film about a crucial human rights issue, we probably would want it to be a useful advocacy tool as well. But then we also felt that our way of making a useful advocacy tool would be to make a good film that people could relate to regardless to who the characters were in terms of the labels.”
The film is distributed by Dogwoof all over the UK and Ireland, click here for a full list of upcoming screnings.
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American evangelicals have dubbed Uganda, a country with a 40 percent Roman Catholic population, ground zero in their war on the homosexual agenda. Inspired by the American evangelicals a new anti-homosexuality bill proposing death for HIV-positive gay men and prison for anyone who fails to turn in a known homosexual awaits debate in the Uganan Parliament.
Call Me Kuchu documents the courageous efforts of Uganda’s first openly gay man, David Kato and his team to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Kato fights to repeal Uganda’s homophobic laws and liberate his fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, also known as kuchu’s. One year into filming and just three weeks after a landmark legal victory, on January 26, 2011, the unthinkable happens: Kato is brutally murdered in his home.
With unprecedented access, Call Me Kuchu depicts the last year in the life of this courageous, quick-witted and steadfast man. The film examines the astounding courage and determination required to battle an oppressive government, a vicious media and a powerful church in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
Directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Duration: 87
Year: 2012
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Whatever else you think about it (and a lot of people have a lot of thoughts), the campaign has succeeded in raising awareness of the crimes of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.
I just thought I’d take the opportunity to flag up this visualisation by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute tracking the spread of the campaign on a number of related Kony hashtags on Twitter during March:
Mark Graham at the OII concludes:
"#Kony’s moment of visibility was both brief and largely transatlantic. This Western-centric pattern of information flow is not necessarily surprising and can be found on many other online platforms. However, given the video’s relevance to East Africa, and the global diffusion of Twitter (e.g. Indonesians form the world’s 6th largest population of Twitter users), we might have expected #Kony to have a slightly less clustered geography."
Worth checking out the original post on the Zero Geography blog at the OII for more details.
]]>With over one hundred million ‘views’ the Kony 2012 video has started a far-reaching debate on the aims and value of a production seen by many as an over-simplification of complex situation.
Produced by the NGO ‘Invisible children’, the video calls for military intervention to “stop Kony and disarm the LRA”.
Host Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House was on the hunt for controversy – which is exactly what he found.
Perhaps the most scathing comments on the video came from film-maker and journalist Callum Macrae.
“Low and behold the world has paid attention and I’m hating every minute of it… This is a dreadful, I’m afraid, campaign. But nonetheless very important and we need to discuss it.”
Macrae says the unwavering focus on Joseph Kony puts him ill at ease.
“We shouldn’t be lowering ourselves to the level of Kony or the people who see him as an African bogeyman, we should be looking at the issues that are raised by it.”
Mareike Schomerus, of LSE’s Justice and Security Research Programme agreed that focusing entirely on Kony is a dangerous simplification.
“If you go into LRA controlled areas and actually stay there it becomes clear that the situation is actually much more complex than elevating just one man to the position of superpower…
When I talk, especially to military men,… and I say to them ‘do you honestly really believe that that one man can be responsible for messing about… 5 national armies and 3 UN missions and the US army, and the French army and sometimes the Israeli army.”
Programmes Director for the charity War Child, Amanda Weisbaum also casts a critical eye on the content of the video.
“They did 30 minutes of filming and they didn’t really do any history surrounding it or any complexities surrounding it… but yes I would have loved the 100 million hits”
But how then do people kindle an interest for African issues? Asks Benjamin Chesterton of production company DuckRabbit.
“Do you think we all start with PHDs?… we have to start somewhere… a percentage of [these people that watched the video] will go away and find out more… and maybe do something more than sitting around debating it.”
Poet and musician of Ugandan descent, Musa Okwonga rejects this out of hand.
“It’s utterly patronising to say that children can’t handle complexity… people followed complex narratives involving multiple characters over seven books with Harry Potter”
The idea put forward by the video that military intervention is the only solution held no water for the panel.
“The lessons of history” says Macrae, “are that it’s always gone wrong; it’s always scatter gun and it’s always brought more havoc”
Watch the full event here:
]]>Despite its inaccuracies this campaign has created wider awareness about Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) than any news report or campaign that has come before it, so what can be learned? Join us for April's First Wednesday as we debate whether the KONY 2012 campaign is a force for good or a worrying development in campaigning.
]]>The recent KONY 2012 campaign video has been met with strong criticism, but nobody can question its effectiveness in reaching a mass audience. The film, created by Invisible Children and featuring director and founder of Invisible Children Jason Russell, is reportedly one of the fastest spreading viral videos ever, reaching over 100 million views in a week.
It has been criticised for presenting a complex situation as a simplified problem with a simple solution, for reinforcing the idea that Africans are helpless victims who need to be ‘saved’ by ‘the West’ and for misrepresenting reality.
Despite its inaccuracies this campaign has created wider awareness about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) than any news report or campaign that has come before it, so what can be learned? Join us for April’s First Wednesday as we debate whether the KONY 2012 campaign is a force for good or a worrying development in campaigning.
Hosted by Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.
With:
Benjamin Chesterton, radio documentary and photofilm producer, co-founder of the production company duckrabbit and the website A Developing Story.
Amanda Weisbaum, Programmes Director at War Child, who work on the ground with communities affected by the LRA in Northern Uganda and Central African Republic.
Musa Okwonga, a football writer, poet and musician of Ugandan descent. He is author of A Cultured Left Foot which was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and Will You Manage?. He is one half of The King’s Will, an electronica outfit that blends poetry, music, and animated videos.
Mareike Schomerus, Research Consortium Director of the Justice and Security Research Programme at LSE and author of many publications including Chasing the Kony story in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality.
Callum Macrae, a film-maker and journalist who has reported, filmed and directed many award-winning television documentaries for Channel 4, the BBC and Al Jazeera English among others. He first made a film about Kony and the LRA in 2003, and has written and made several films about the LRA since.
]]>Download this episode
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By Antje Bormann
Broadcaster Sue Steward introduced Carol Allen Storey as one of the most fascinating photojournalists around. Carol Allen Storey’s photographic career started 10 years ago following a thorough rethink of a successful career in the fashion and beauty industry.
Photographs by Edmond Terakopian.
Carol Allen Storey documents the lives of women and orphans affected by HIV-AIDS in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. She focuses on the stigmatisation of HIV-AIDS sufferers and the indomitable spirit that keeps them going against the odds. Her stunning, emotionally-charged images had the room completely silent as she explained the fate of each subject.
She told the story of a woman who single-handedly looks after 32 children, all of them her nieces and nephews whose parents have already succumbed to AIDS, who had contracted the virus while caring for them.
She also told the story of the ‘dustbin boys’, a gang of feral children aged seven to 14 who live off what they can find on rubbish tips and outside slaughter houses, who take drugs to relieve boredom and as they grow older slip into gambling. In contrast, the gang also adopted the 6-month-old baby of a sex worker who had died from AIDS and take turns looking after the little one.
There were stories of children who, once diagnosed with HIV, are made to wear a red badge, a sign that sets them apart from their healthy – or simply as yet undiagnosed – classmates. The children sometimes don’t even know why they are wearing the badge, why they are not allowed to play with the other kids in the school yard.
Alice Fay, HIV Programme development advisor for the charity Save the Children shed some light on how children are treated once they are diagnosed. Children may be diagnosed and treated for HIV but will not be informed of their diagnosis until they are at least 8 years old, she revealed.
There were a number of questions to Carol Allen Storey and Alice Fay from the audience about measures taken by African governments to get the problem of HIV-AIDS under control, with one person saying that it had to start with educating men.
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