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    ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’ Review: A Pop Star Turns Politician

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    Uganda has been under authoritarian rule for decades. Wine has doggedly challenged its leader, and this documentary shows the price he’s paid.The pop-culture personage turned politician is not so novel a figure as it used to be. But the Ugandan pop singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, who goes by the stage name Bobi Wine, has earned, by way of his courage and resilience, the special consideration this documentary affords him.“Bobi Wine: The People’s President” opens by laying out the situation in Wine’s East African country: its leader, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, having seized power in 1986 (several years after the military strongman sank the country into civil war), has shown no inclination to give it up. Wine was vocal in his opposition to the regime, but after the 2015 election, when Museveni engineered an amendment to the Constitution rescinding the presidential age limit, the pop singer-turned-politician decided to run for office.Wine the campaigner is cheerful and stylish. He and his cadre dress all in red. He cuts songs whose lyrics function as policy planks: “To free ghetto people we must educate/but education is expensive.”By 2017, Wine is an elected member of Parliament and votes against Museveni’s scheme. The autocrat’s vindictive response is relentless, and lasts years. Wine is jailed, emerging sick and limping. He flies to the States in 2018 to seek treatment — he claims his jailers poisoned him — and gain publicity. When he runs for president against Museveni, in 2021, things really ramp up.The directors Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp seem to have had intimate access to Wine and his family, and this, along with their clear admiration for the crusader, doesn’t always work in the movie’s favor. The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.Bobi Wine: The People’s PresidentRated PG-13 for violence. In English and Swahili with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Once Upon a Time in Uganda’ Review: When Ragtag Met Rambo

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      A new documentary tells how a Ugandan filmmaker and an American producer have reshaped African cinema.Wakaliwood is more than a production house; it’s a spirit of ragtag moviemaking born from the pure desire to create. Founded in 2005 by the writer-director Isaac Nabwana and based in Wakaliga, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, the studio produces low-budget, hyperviolent action films inspired by “Rambo” and Chuck Norris but starring African actors.The director Cathryne Czubek’s documentary “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” is as playful as Nabwana’s audacious movies, explaining how the unlikely partnership between the Ugandan filmmaker and the American producer Alan “Ssali” Hofmanis has reshaped African cinema.The documentary is initially told from Hofmanis’s perspective. He explains how a trailer for Nabwana’s “Who Killed Captain Alex?” on YouTube inspired him to travel to Uganda, where he witnessed a pure film culture so unlike the cynical movie business that had burned him out in America that he decided to permanently move to the African country to become a multi-hyphenate creative partner on Nabwana’s Wakaliwood movies.Czubek poses the relationship between Nabwana and Hofmanis as an artistic roller coaster: They’re either gleefully collaborating on script ideas for a cannibal movie or having a falling out over the direction of the studio. Czubek’s strategy means Nabwana’s wife, Harriet, the head of the studio, doesn’t get much attention, and it leaves unexamined Hofmanis’s desire to share his “discovery” of Wakaliwood, through his white gaze, with the world.The film is strongest when capturing Nabwana’s resourcefulness, the exuberance of the local volunteers who serve as his actors and crew, and the joy his films bring to a Ugandan audience hungry for movies. “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” reminds you how the art of moviemaking can make dreams real.Once Upon a Time in UgandaNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Downstream to Kinshasa’ Review: Sisyphean Persistence

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      Dieudo Hamadi’s documentary follows survivors of war as they demand long-overdue government compensation.The bow of a barge cuts through rippling water, carrying a boatload of people down the Congo River. Crammed in with barely any space to move, the passengers banter, dance, cook, eat, sleep and cling desperately to sheets of tarpaulin when the rain pours.The camera stays with a small group of disabled men and women within this jostling mass. These are the survivors of a bloody six-day conflict fought between Uganda and Rwanda in Kisangani, a city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2000. They are on their way to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, to demand their long-overdue government compensation, which the survivors say amounts to $1 billion.
      A documentary about Sisyphean persistence in the face of institutional indifference, “Downstream to Kinshasa” is riveting in these boat scenes. The director Dieudo Hamadi enters the fray with his subjects, his gaze neither voyeuristic nor ethnographic. As he threads through the boat with his hand-held phone camera, his lens is lashed by the wind and raindrops; later, when the survivors demonstrate at Congo’s parliament, the police repeatedly swat the director’s camera away.Hamadi intersperses these electric scenes of protest with quieter moments of the survivors fiddling with their cheap and uncomfortable prosthetic limbs, debating strategy and staging plays about their experiences. The film sometimes flags in energy as it cuts between these different strands, but its pace feels faithful to just how halting the fight for justice can be when democracy becomes impenetrable to those it serves. Watching the subjects of “Downstream to Kinshasa” — whose tenacity the movie honors but never romanticizes — it’s hard not to wonder: What good is the right to protest if it falls on deaf ears?Downstream to KinshasaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In Lingala and Swahili, with subtitles. On virtual cinemas. More