Queen of Katwe: Review

Queen of Katwe, directed by an Indian and set in a slum in Uganda, might sound like an unlikely Disney project. Yet, as it unfolds, Disney-like qualities do come to the fore. It has a determined heroine at its centre, a studio staple all the way from Snow White to Frozen. This is probably the closest a Mira Nair film has come to family viewing, this despite the sporadic violence and mentions of prostitution and the ever-present poverty of Katwe, a slum in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. Above all, there’s the very Disney reassurance that nothing too terrible is going to happen. Like last year’s beautiful Kaaka Muttai, which showed us the squalor of its young protagonists’ lives but wrapped everything in warm vibes, Queen of Katwe is rarely downbeat or devoid of hope.

Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga) lives with her mother, Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o), her two brothers and elder sister in a run-down shanty in Katwe. She and her brother sell corn in the market but the money from that isn’t enough to guarantee a square meal a day. So, when she discovers that her brother has joined a sports outreach programme which guarantees a free cup of porridge a day, the nine-year-old tags along. There, she’s noticed by Robert Katende (David Oyelowo), a former football player who teaches the local children chess. Mutesi can’t read, has no prior training, but she shows an unusual aptitude for the game.

Anyone who’s seen a couple of Nair’s films knows the speed at which she can zip through a narrative. Here, she alternates between Mutesi’s almost miraculously improving game and her hardscrabble home life, all the while providing vignettes of life in colourful, chaotic Kampala. Mutesi’s first big win is in a school tournament, a sequence that’s written broadly (mean posh schoolkids taunting poorer rivals is a time-worn sports film trope) but staged with great economy and humour. Chess enthusiasts may feel disappointed that more time isn’t spent on the board, but Nair is interested in other things, like the confidence with which the players pick up their pencils and tap the clocks, or the mental advantage that a lollipop might give a well-off boy over one from a slum.

As with his screenplay for Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, William Wheeler’s writing is a little too on-the-nose. Yet, Queen of Katwe is elevated by the uniqueness of Mutesi’s story and the specificity of Nair’s eye. The director has lived in Kampala, on and off, for 27 years now, and it shows in the astonishing level of detail she summons: the finger snaps and paraffin lamps; a solitary goat on top of a piled-up truck carrier; Mutesi removing her shoes before the most important match of her life. It’s as dynamic and unsentimental a portrait of slum life as her first feature film, Salaam Bombay!, made over 25 years ago. The only thing that’s changed is the slight gloss this film has, and the absence of real danger.

The graceful Nalwanga, a dancer by training, captures Mutesi’s shy speaking style well, but the key performances are by the film’s stars. Oyelowo gets to turn on the charm, for the real Robert Katende has the charisma of a movie star himself (see A Fork, A Spoon and a Knight, a short film on his life, co-directed by Nair). Nyong’o is fierce and desperate and resourceful—sometimes all at once, like in the scene where she approaches a shady cloth merchant with an offer. During the end credits, the actors are joined onscreen, one by one, by the person they’ve portrayed. It’s a wonderful idea, and an indication of how, for all its larger implications, this was probably a very personal film for everyone involved.

This review appeared in Mint.

MS Dhoni: The Untold Story: Review

The downside of calling your film M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story is that it’s easy for someone to point out after it’s done that a lot of the story is still untold. Let me be that person. This is a film for acolytes—people who want to see some kind of Superdhoni on their screens instead of the inscrutable iceberg who also happened to be one of the most significant cricketers of his generation.

Right from the start, this is a fairy tale disguised as an underdog story.This is not to say that the film isn’t faithful to the broader details of Dhoni’s life and career. It’s the treatment: the way things fall into place the way they rarely do in real life. When, as a young football enthusiast, he’s first handed wicket-keeping gloves, he drops the first few catches, then latches on to everything after that. Batting in the nets for the first time, he hits the first ball back over the bowler’s head. Throughout the film, there are only a few instances of Dhoni being dismissed; getting out, apparently, is for mortals.

Working with co-writer Dilip Jha, writer-director Neeraj Pandey uses the intermission to divide the Dhoni saga (from childhood till the 2011 World Cup) into two halves that could have been titled “persistence” and “payoff”. We’re shown how Dhoni’s hitting makes him a legend in his school, then in his hometown of Ranchi; how he misses his chance to play for the U-19 team; how he takes a job as a ticket collector in the hope of representing Railways in the Ranji Trophy. Played by Sushant Singh Rajput, the Dhoni we see on screen is always quietly confident, with the beatific smile of someone who knows things will work out. It’s as if the makers are afraid the audience might think less of the character if he betrayed a few nerves.

As Dhoni’s career seems to grind to a halt—like the trains he’s supposed to keep tabs on—the film stalls as well. But intermissions (and their effect on screenplays) are strange things. When the film resumes, Dhoni is quickly elevated to the India A team, then to the national side. Suddenly, we’re not only watching cricket, but watching Indians watch cricket, which is just as entertaining. We see his sceptical father, his supportive mother and sister, friends who’ve supported him since his schooldays, his first coach, yell at the TV, advise him on how to play, blame everyone but him for his dismissal. For once, instead of being told how special Dhoni is, we see his greatness reflected in their reactions.

Apart from a brilliantly cast Herry Tangiri as a young Yuvraj Singh, the film avoids having actors play the Indian team of the time. Instead, it inserts Rajput as Dhoni into actual match footage. It’s the film’s one big gamble. On the one hand, the makers no longer have to run the risk of looking silly while recreating moments that cricket fans know by heart. Yet, this approach also results in a lack of immediacy. We never feel the heat of the moment, never hear the crowd’s chants as Dhoni would have heard them. We’re removed from the action—twice removed, in fact.

The film runs through the major signposts in Dhoni’s career, but we never get a sense of how victory and defeat affected the man or altered his game or personality. The 2007 World Cup loss, after which his effigy was burnt outside his home in Ranchi, is widely regarded as a turning point in his life. Here, it just comes and goes—a little detail in the inexorable rise of Dhoni. Same with the 2007 World Twenty20 win, the origin of the Dhoni-as-leader legend. Other Bollywood sports films such as Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Mary Kom, even Sultan, have been able to link events in their protagonists’ lives to their athletic performance. Yet, even that doesn’t happen here. We see the tragic end of one of his relationships. Did this make him a more guarded person? The film isn’t saying.

Anyone expecting M.S. Dhoni to be even mildly controversial probably doesn’t know that one of the producers is Arun Pandey, the cricketer’s friend and business partner. The closest the film comes to ruffling feathers is when Dhoni, speaking as captain to the selection committee, asks for three senior players be dropped from the ODI team. However, the players aren’t identified, which renders the conversation slightly ridiculous (people around me started muttering “Sehwag?”, “Laxman?”). From the start, it was always likely that the film would end up a hagiography. Yet, even a glorified account of Dhoni’s career might have found ways to say insightful, non-contentious things about cricket in this country. There are a couple of scattered moments that’ll appeal to fans—when he hits a match-winning six in a school game, Dhoni does the same bat twirl that followed his sealing of the 2011 World Cup—but, considering this is a three-hour film, there should have been more.

For someone who doesn’t look particularly like Dhoni, Rajput does a remarkable job breaking down and reassembling the visible aspects of the man: that quick, confident walk, the clipped nature of his speech in English, those strange strokes. If Rajput can’t give us an idea of what Dhoni is like beneath the surface, it’s probably because the film is unwilling to delve deeper. A series of talented bit players come and go, enlivening scenes that would have otherwise fallen flat: Rajesh Sharma as Dhoni’s first coach; Kumud Mishra as an early benefactor; Brijendra Kala and Mukesh Bhatt as comic relief commentators.

M.S. Dhoni is a blandly professional piece of work. This might be enough for fans of the man, but for anyone who’d hoped that the first ever film about a still-active Indian cricketer might have traces of insight or daring, this will likely be a disappointment. The film ends with the World Cup win and Rajput’s face, followed by the director credit—a moment greeted with indifference by the audience I saw the film with. Only when the real Dhoni appeared on screen for a few seconds was some applause heard. The message seemed clear: Dhoni still strikes a chord, M.S. Dhoni not so much.

This review appeared in Mint.

The rebirth of Royal Opera House

In Stones Of Empire: The Buildings Of The Raj, Jan Morris writes that of all the performance venues the British built in Calcutta, Simla, Madras and Bombay, the only one with “proper theatrical flair” was the Royal Opera House in Mumbai. “This late-Victorian building was unmistakably the real thing,” she declares, before rhapsodizing about its “indispensable” first-floor veranda, chandeliers, Corinthian columns, arcade (“for flower-sellers, of course”) and gas-lit court, “all of which…seemed to await the arrival of Signor Puccini”. “Instead,” she writes, “the movies came.

The Royal Opera House—the only surviving opera house in India—has always been associated with cinema, long before it became a single-screen theatre. It was built by a Parsi merchant, Jehangir Framji Karaka, and Maurice E. Bandmann, an American who had worked as an actor in late 19th century England before setting up a theatrical empire. Known as the Bandmann Circuit, it stretched from the Mediterranean to the Far East, and brought productions ranging from musical comedy to ragtime and opera to the British colonies. He also took to interspersing his theatrical productions with films. When the Royal Opera House opened in 1915 (the building was inaugurated by King George V in 1911), the programme included a vaudeville act featuring an English dancer called Roshanara, and three films.

After a gap of more than two decades, a restored and refurbished Opera House will now be opening its doors to the public again. Though it won’t be used as a screening venue any more, the first public event here will nevertheless be connected to the movies. The opening ceremony of the 18th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival will be held there on 20 October. Since prior access to the Opera House has been denied, we cannot confirm whether the new interiors retain the elongated pilasters, Italianate balustrades, Minton tile flooring, marble statues, crystal chandelier and gold ceiling of the original (according to the World Monuments Fund, which put the building on its at-risk list for 2012).

In its early years, the Opera House hosted concerts, the occasional opera, theatrical performances, lectures (Mahatma Gandhi addressed a conference there in 1934) and film screenings. In 1952, it was bought by the maharaja of Gondal, Vikram Sinhji; since then, it has been with the royal family. As a plush-looking single-screen theatre, it was a popular venue for film premieres. V Shantaram not only opened Dahej here on 19 May 1950, he also placed a cut-out of the star Jayashree, complete with a mechanically powered veil, by the road outside. Yet, by the 1980s, business had slowed. In 1993, the owners decided to close the theatre. The following decade and a half saw the building fall into disrepair.

In 2009, the process of restoring the Opera House began. Conservationist and architect Abha Narain Lambah was put in charge of the project. The damage to the building in the years it had remained closed meant that the structure had to be secured before the refurbishing could begin. “There were severe structural threats to this building,” Lambah told The Times Of India in 2015. “There were peepal trees growing out of it… The steel (girders) had corroded to the extent of becoming like lace. The jack arches had to be supported, balconies tied back, side verandas reconstructed and roof repaired.”

Once the structure was secure, work began on the interior. One of the challenges before Lambah was trying to get an idea of what the Opera House looked like in its heyday. “Various sources of information have been pieced together, from old photographs to documents, oral histories and investigative diagnostics,” she said over email. “Sharada Dwivedi initially helped with the historical information and then we found an old publication from 1917 with photographs of the theatre. We used oral histories as well, and Hindi films from the 1940s-1970s had clips of the Opera House, which helped piece its history, materials and colours together,” says Lambah. One of these clips was presumably the famous scene from Aag (1948) in which Raj Kapoor wanders on to a stage in a seemingly empty theatre and is “discovered”. It’s fitting that Kapoor featured the Opera House in his directorial debut—his family used it as a regular venue for their plays.

In August, Asad Lalljee, chief executive officer of Avid Learning, was brought on board to help plan a new cultural slate for the Opera House. “We are going to handle the social media, the PR and the programming,” he says. After the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival opening, they’re planning a soft launch with an opera piece by soprano Patricia Rozario, after which they’ll work out the kinks and open for business by mid-November. Lalljee says they will initially offer it as a performance space for theatre, dance, music and opera, and later start curating original programmes. “It doesn’t have to be traditional arts,” he says. “I love the idea of a traditional space juxtaposed with something cutting-edge. I’d love to do a TED (ideas) talk here.”

Even as it looks to define itself for a new century, one thing seems certain for now: The Royal Opera House will no longer be a movie theatre. “We don’t want any more movie hall,” Maharanisaheb Kumud Kumari, daughter-in-law of Vikram Sinhji, says over the phone. “They’re not successful at all. I mean, everyone is going to Inox now.”

Channel Orange: Review

Four years ago, Frank Ocean released his first studio album, Channel Orange, and overnight, became the Great New Hope of RnB. Yet, Channel Orange clearly wasn’t really RnB in the traditional sense. Ocean had, and still has, a charming—or, depending on your outlook, frustrating— aversion to verse-chorus-verse songwriting. With his new album, Blonde, he pushes his lush, languid sound further, and the results are just as stunning.

Blonde, which is different in its LP and Apple Music versions, kicks off with "Nikes", the anti-album opener. Ocean sings in a heavily treated voice about Carmelo Anthony and A$AP Rocky and two dozen other things; it’s only after the three-minute mark that we hear his voice clearly. The lyrics reference drugs (“Acid on me like the rain/weed crumbles into glitter”) and complicated relationships (“I’m not him but I’ll mean something to you”)—themes that’ll recur through Blonde—but with Ocean, the joy isn’t so much in the allusions and wordplay, amusing as those can be, but in the delivery—now jabbing like a lovelorn boxer, now relaxing into a seductive croon.

Even more than Channel Orange, this album is RnB refracted, reengineered into something that contains its DNA but not its traditional structures. "Ivy", co-written with ex-Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, has Ocean singing over a dream-pop-like guitar figure. "Pretty Sweet" begins with an orchestral squall and ends with children’s voices singing “We know you’re sweet like a sucka”. The meditative, touching "White Ferrari" uses the melody and one line from The Beatles’ "Here, There and Everywhere". There are a few guest spots: Beyoncé and James Blake contribute discreet vocals, Kendrick Lamar a brief rap on "Skyline To", André 3000 the album’s most agitated moment on "Solo (Reprise)". But mostly, we’re alone with Ocean’s languid, druggy melancholia.

Unlike like D’Angelo with Black Messiah or Beyoncé with Lemonade, Ocean doesn’t seem to want to start a revolution. Trayvon Martin is mentioned, and a hurricane, but the songs mostly revolve around love and sex and being in the public eye: Drakean themes, but explored by a warier artist. Ocean’s fealty to hip hop shows in the rushed metre of his singing, the density of his writing, and that fact that Blonde is a producer’s, rather than a player’s, album. Sometimes, a bit of instrumentation breaks through—woozy keyboards on "Skyline To", Big Star-like guitar chimes on "Nights"—but you never get a mental image of a singer recording with actual musicians. It doesn’t matter. Dense and sexy and meandering in a way that only Ocean can pull off, Blonde is an immensely satisfying sophomore effort.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.

The Magnificent Seven: Review

Let me say right off that I don’t consider the 1960 Magnificent Seven, a Western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, to be a particularly good film. Crudely directed and poorly written, it was just about saved by Charles Lang’s photography and the tussle for screen space among Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, James Coburn and Charles Bronson. That the new Magnificent Seven, directed by Antoine Fuqua, improves on it in most respects is hardly surprising. If it were comparable to Kurosawa’s film… well, that would’ve been something.

Whatever one may think of Quentin Tarantino’s last two Westerns, at least they dealt head-on with the implications of what it is they were showing onscreen. Fuqua’s film, set in the 1870s, has a posse so breathtakingly multi-racial it would seem to turn genre convention on its head. Yet, the film never suggests that the white men among the seven had any problem taking orders from a black man, or that there was any friction between a Native American and a former Indian killer. It’s revisionist for revisionist’s sake—there’s no political charge in its challenging of genre conventions.

The broad story is the same as the earlier films. Industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) and his gang have been terrorizing a small town named Rose Creek. The citizens, desperate, decide to hire gunfighters to defend them. They convince bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), who in turn sets about hiring six other crusty veterans: Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt); Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and his knife-throwing sidekick Billy Rocks (South Korean actor Byung-hun Lee); a Mexican, Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo); a trapper, Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio) and a Comanche, Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) – the last name a little nod to those who know their Kurosawa references.

After a complicated standoff, the seven settle down to lay traps, work out their respective neuroses and wait for the battle, which, when it comes, is rather magnificent. Fuqua may not be the most inventive of directors—he pans up bodies so many times it becomes comical— but he’s spent most of his career making action films, and the prospect of remaking the greatest fight scene of all time (Seven Samurai, not the Sturges film) seems to have fired him up. It takes up—or seems to take up—a quarter of the film’s two-hour running time. What comes before is unremarkable but diverting: Pratt overdoes his hyper-masculine shtick, but Hawke and Washington are watchable as always, and D’Onofrio is delightfully weird. In an astonishing show of restraint, Elmer Bernstein’s famous score from the 1960 film is only heard at the end. It’s a good decision: that joyous, leaping tune wouldn’t have suited this gritty remake.

This review appeared in Mint.

Parched: Review

What unites Nil Battey Sannata, Angry Indian Goddesses and Parched isn’t just that they’re female-led films, but that they’re built around conversations between women. In Hindi cinema, female-only conversation is rarer than you’d think. Even a film as forward-looking in its gender politics as Piku was mostly built around male-female or male-male conversations. Bajirao Mastani starred two of the Bollywood’s top female stars, but only allowed them a handful of scenes together. If we relied on our films for an idea of what women sound like when they talk to each other, we wouldn’t just be misguided, we’d be clueless.

Leena Yadav’s Parched doesn’t just redress the balance, it turns it on its head. There’s barely a scene in the film in which men are talking only to men, and only a couple where men and women are conversing. Instead, we get women talking to women, as friends, relations and sometimes, something much more complex (what does a widow say to her late husband’s mistress? You’ll find out). This, for me, is the most noteworthy thing in the film, though it’ll probably be its sexual frankness that gets talked about more.

In a small, conservative village in what could either be Rajasthan or Gujarat, 32-year-old widow Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is struggling to put together the money to get her son married. Her friend Lajjo (Radhika Apte) is dealing with the stigma of being unable to conceive. Bijli (Surveen Chawla) is a stage dancer and part-time prostitute; she can’t move around the village without inviting comment. Janaki (Lehar Khan), 15 years old, is being married off against her will. With the exception of Kishan (Sumeet Vyas), all the men are unfeeling and close-minded, and, in the case of Lajjo’s and Rani’s (deceased) husbands, physically abusive.

All of this might lead you to expect a film that’s well-meaning, grim and difficult to watch. But Parched is unexpectedly exuberant, fired not only by the small and large acts of defiance of these women but also by their determination to claim their fair share of joy—in this lifetime, as Rani insists in one scene. This could be something as simple as the women of the village lobbying for a TV or as layered as Rani feeling the intimate touch of a hand, even if it’s one offered more in friendship than in lust, after a gap of 17 years. Even the jokey bawdiness of their banter is a kind of rebellion—a reclaiming of their bodies and their desires.

Parched premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival a year ago; since then, it’s been screened at festivals in various countries and released in theatres in the US and Europe. It isn’t hard to imagine this film set in a corner of rural India striking a chord with people in distant lands: it is lively, charged and accessible. Chatterjee, Apte and Chawla are thoroughly enjoyable, and find excellent support in Chandan K. Anand as Bijli’s besotted helper and Riddhi Sen as Rani’s entitled son. There are some concessions to exotica—three item numbers, musicians singing on top of a bus—but nothing egregiously silly, except perhaps Adil Hussain as a mystic lovemaker-for-hire.

When placed alongside films like Sairat or Killa—which give the impression that the makers have lived in the spaces inhabited by the characters—Parched feels like sharply-observed tourism. It’s worth noting that the film, which is very clear-eyed about the injustices women face in rural India, wraps up its storylines with a reasonable amount of optimism. Sairat had teased the viewer with a similar fantasy, before shattering the illusion with a head-shot of an ending. Intellectually, we know that social mores and regressive tradition will crush optimism and happy endings almost every time. Yet, there’s also that part of us which wants to see likeable characters who’ve put through the ringer delivered to safety, however improbable that may be. In this, as in other matters, Parched sides with the heart, not the head.

This review appeared in Mint.

From Kampala, with love

That Mira Nair has, over the course of 37 years and 10 feature films, largely avoided repeating herself is both remarkable and not remarked upon enough. Few directors today can claim to have worked in as many varied settings and styles. The Rourkela-born Nair has made hyper-realistic street films and lavish costume dramas, ensemble pieces and techno-thrillers. Her stories have taken place in 16th century India and post-9/11 Pakistan, in the American Deep South, Kolkata, New York, Havana and Delhi.

Those who’ve kept up with Nair over the years would have noted her penchant for celebrating her home cities on film. Kolkata, where she spent summers as a child, became one of the settings for The Namesake. New Delhi, where she went to college, got one of its defining films in Monsoon Wedding (2001). New York, where she currently spends half her year, was one of the settings for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). And Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where she spends the other six months, was seen at the start of Mississippi Masala (1991). Now, Nair has made her first full film in Kampala: Queen Of Katwe, the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

“If we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will,” Nair says, over the phone from Kampala. It isn’t surprising that Nair would speak of this story in personal terms. She has lived in Kampala for 27 years now, ever since she went to research Mississippi Masala and fell in love with academic Mahmood Mamdani there. In 2004, she founded Maisha Film Labs, a non-profit organization that provides scholarships, produces films and imparts skills. During our conversation, she repeatedly referred to the locations in the film in terms of their distance from her Kampala home.

Though Mutesi grew up in the slums of Katwe, just 15 minutes away from where Nair lives, the director hadn’t gotten wind of her exploits. It was a phone call from Disney executive Tendo Nagenda which brought Mutesi on to her radar in early 2013. Two weeks later, she met Mutesi—then on a tour of the US—in New York City. She was struck, she said, by the 17-year-old’s modesty and shyness. In Kampala, she met Mutesi’s mother, Harriet, who took her around the city in a van and showed her six houses they’d previously lived in and been forced to leave. They visited each other’s homes; Nair planted seeds in Harriet’s garden. “It’s only because I’ve seen your garden that I can ask you to plant mine,” Harriet told her.

Nair’s films are packed with strivers, underdogs and outsiders—Salaam Bombay!’s Chaipau, Monsoon Wedding’s Dubey, Amelia Earhart in Amelia—but Mutesi is a special case. As Tim Crothers wrote in a 2011 profile of her for ESPN The Magazine: “To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.” After her father died of AIDS when she was 4, Mutesi and her two brothers were raised by Harriet. Finding adequate food was a daily struggle; Mutesi would sell corn to help her mother out. One day, nine-year-old Mutesi followed her brother Brian to the local Sports Outreach Institute. She’d never played that game with the black and white pieces—all she knew was that they gave you porridge if you attended.

This is how Robert Katende entered Mutesi’s life. In a 2014 short film co-directed by Nair called A Fork, A Spoon And A Knight, we learn how Katende started the chess programme after he noticed children standing on the sidelines of the football games he coached. Katende taught Mutesi to play and, crucially, realized that the girl showed an unusual aptitude for the game. Soon, the 10-year-old was beating boarding-school children. In 2007, aged 11, she won the Uganda Women’s Junior Championship. She won it again the following year, and the year after that. In 2012, she became the first woman to win the open category of the National Junior Chess Championship. She repeated her triumph in 2013. She has been part of the Ugandan women’s team at the last three Chess Olympiads in Siberia, Turkey and Norway.

In 2012, the ESPN profile was expanded into a book, The Queen Of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path To Becoming A Chess Champion, by Crothers. This was adapted for the screen by William Wheeler, who’d worked with Nair on The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Meanwhile, Nair’s short film on Katende became a “calling card of sorts”, an introduction to the film’s themes and one of its primary characters. Disney green-lit the film—very quickly, Nair says.

It probably helped that the people Nair had in mind to play Harriet and Robert—David Oyelowo (Selma) and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years A Slave)—were both Oscar-nominated actors. Nyong’o and Nair knew each other well; the actor had done a stint at Maisha, and had been Nair’s assistant during the filming of The Namesake. Nair says she sent both of them the script within hours of it being completed. Madina Nalwanga, a dancer by training, was cast as Mutesi; like the character she plays, she too is from the slums of Kampala, and sold corn as a child.

One of the biggest challenges for Nair was figuring out how to make chess—one of the most static of sports—into something visually compelling. She and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt devised different visual approaches for the various matches Mutesi plays. Katende, who was present for the duration of the shoot, designed the games, after which Nair and Bobbitt worked out how to shoot each individual one. In scenes with multiple games taking place simultaneously, this became all the more complicated. “The call sheet would have actual chess moves on it,” Nair says. Later, she and editor Barry Alexander Brown “cut the games emotionally, like a drama”.

After the somewhat underwhelming Amelia (2009) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Queen Of Katwe appears to return Nair to her roots. Salaam Bombay! (1988), her first feature, emerged from her fascination with the vérité tradition. She shot the 1988 film in 55 days in the brothels and slums of Bombay, with a cast and crew full of non-professionals and first-timers. Queen Of Katwe may have the backing of a big American studio, but it too was shot on location, in slums and crowded streets, with locals filling in many of the smaller parts (Nair estimated that out of the 100-odd Ugandans in the film, 80 had never faced the camera before).

If films about chess are a rarity on world cinema screens, so are films about Africa. African stories rarely make their way to screens outside the continent, and the ones that do are usually directed by foreigners. Queen Of Katwe could be seen as a corrective: an insider’s view of a specific corner of Africa, made by an adopted daughter who believes she’s “become Ugandan now”.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.