By Staff Writer
Amakula International Film Festival is an annual film festival founded in 2004 by Dutch film historian Alice Smits and American filmmaker Lee Elickson that takes place in Uganda.
Amakula is Uganda’s oldest film festival and the first Amakula Kampala International Film Festival was launched on May 21, 2004. The festival features programs like the screenings, panel discussions, workshops, seminars and the Golden Impala awards ceremony, which is the climax of the festival.
For the years the festival has been around, Amakula has managed to change the Uganda movie industry, giving filmmakers an opportunity to showcase their works to the general public and their tendency of screening movies from across the continent has helped the local filmmakers a lot since they have learned from the foreign film makers, who are technically superior.
We managed to talk to a few filmmakers and Curators about Amakula International Film Festival who praised it for grooming local talent and giving them an opportunity to showcase their works.
Mathew Nabwiso, a producer and filmmaker whose movie, Rain, is among the movies to be screened at the 11th edition of the festival, revealed how it has helped to market Ugandan movies.
“Amakula is just like any other festival across the world. It is a platform that exhibits movies, creating for them market and I am super excited about Rain, a movie I am part of, that is set to be screened at this year’s edition.” Mathew told this website.
Another filmmaker we managed to get a comment from was Aaron Zziwa, behind movies like Wako (2015), Superstition (2014) and Break In (2017). Aaron also praised Amakula International Film Festival for the huge role they have played in promoting Uganda’s movie industry.
“It is one of the film festivals that is on an international level, it laid a fundamental foundation in the Ugandan movie industry due to its uniqueness since it was the first of its kind. Unfortunately I was unable to get my movie to be screened on this year’s edition due to the stiff competition and this shows you how the industry is growing and has produced a lot of talented film makers,” Aaron noted.
“Like in the previous editions, I hope this year’s too they introduce us to film distributors since they are the people that take our movies to the end user,” he added.
In 2012, Amakula screened Kenya’s Nairobi Half Life, a movie that turned out to be a success across the world getting international nods and Dar Noir which won the best feature film at the last Amakula Edition (2016) got a lot of attention worldwide.
Polly Kamukama one of the curators of the festival noted that, “The Cinema industry in Africa is virtually controlled by Hollywood and therefore little local movies are shown in cinemas hence one of the aims for this festival is to enable filmmakers across Africa get audience for their movies since from different parts of the continent.”
“We have over 42 films set to be screen during this year’s edition and most of them are African including 19 from Uganda,” he added.