IMANI went down a treat at the PALM SPRINGS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL this month in California U.S.A

Screened as part of the CINEMA SAFARI section.

Imani (2010; Uganda / Sweden)–In the course of just one day in contemporary Uganda, we venture into the seemingly unrelated lives of a child soldier, a maid, and a hip hop dancer. A refreshing snapshot of a country settling into a new national identity with richly drawn characters and vivid cinematography. Director: Caroline Kamya. Cast: Rehema Nanfuka, Philip Buyi, Stephen Ocen. IMDb.

Watch an interview of Director Caroline Kamya on American TV

http://www.kpsplocal2.com/mediacenter/local.aspx

Imani is a slice of three very different lives in one day in Uganda. Given that I couldn’t call to mind anything about Uganda that didn’t seem to be about Idi Amin, this was a refreshing and observational but not necessarily critical look at the dichotomised society of contemporary Uganda – town and country, rich and poor, peace and violence. Imani(meaning “faith” in Swahili) is a dichotomy in itself in that its slow moving pace gives the impression of not much happening while, in fact, the day that unfolds is a momentous one for our three protagonists.

Our protagonists are Mary (Rehema Nanfuka) a young single mother who leaves her son in the village to work in town as a maid in the Kampala home of a wealthy young woman not even a generation older; Armstrong (Philip Buyi Roy) a teenaged hip hop dancer who has travelled the world with his talent and now puts on dance performances in local community centres; and Olweny (Stephen Ocen) a young boy not even yet in his teens, who is leaving a rehabilitation centre for former child soldiers to return to his family after four years absence.

It’s hard at first to figure out where the film is going and, with its slow pace, directorCaroline Kamya’s skill seems to be in keeping you watching – avidly. Perhaps it’s the undertone of violence which we’re all too often led to believe pervades the lives of Africans and which is evident, for instance, in Mary’s sister’s face, beaten to a pulp by her husband, or in the fact that Olweny is on his way home after having spent years doing things that child soldiers do – but none of this violence is actually seen on screen. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this is a very gentle, non-confrontational film. Even when Armstrong, our hip-hop dancer, meets up with a someone he used to run with in his past life, now a “Ghetto King” (this being his actual nickname), anticipation mounts of the obvious stand-off that’s about to happen but which never does.

But, let’s be honest, violence, in whatever form it takes, has been done to death (no pun intended) on film. What Kamya does here instead, is stealthily observe the ways in which people, regardless of their own station in life, try to exert power over the lives of others. In Olweny’s case we see the aftermath of that power, a seemingly naturally gentle, introverted, loner of a child who has to come to terms with a past which, while short in length, will surely be far reaching in its impact on his life. And then what? Does escaping and/or leaving behind war automatically mean entering peace? Well, the battles might be different, but when Armstrong’s less than savoury past catches up with him in the form of King, it’s not so much to harm him physically, but to remind him that King, and the nefarious lifestyle he leads, still has influence over Armstrong, an influence which King is only to happy to exert, and which will always tentatively but instinctively be a draw, even if only to ask for abeyance. Even when Armstrong returns to his dance troupe unscathed after his encounter with King, you get the feeling he’s not altogether out of the woods. And as for Mary, while she herself is a resilient woman doing her best by her child and sister, as a maid, it would seem that her service to others is pretty much cut and dried but, surprisingly, it’s from a less likely source that her personal tormentor is to come, and that it comes on the back of the guise of help makes it all the more stomach churning.

by MSWOO 

SHADOW AND ACT  - On Cinema Of The African Diaspora

Caroline Kamya’s fast and confident directing effortless makes the most of the beautiful Ugandan setting. IMANI can be seen as an outstanding example of new African Cinema  production.

This film shows Uganda with serious gaps between the rich and the poor and scars of warfare.  The film follows three different characters as they overcome their life obstacles in different situations and this brilliant structure leads audiences to look at Ugandan society from various angels.  The editing becomes faster as the film runs to the latter half and this should be the formal correspondence of the characters’ physical and mental crisis.  The show in the end of the film may reflect the hope of young Ugandans.  This is the first Ugandan film to screened at the Pusan International Film Festival thus announcing the appearance of a noteworthy and brilliant African female Director.  (RHEE Soue-won)

www.afrykamera.pl

IMANI –  AWARDED “CRITICS AWARD FOR THE BEST FEATURE FILM”

IMANI has the ability to present complex realities of the historical, social country in the condensed time being taken to attempt to settle the past and dealt with, inter alia, describing the problems of the country and women in society.”

http://czara.filmaster.pl/notka/imani-znaczy-wiara/

REVIEW

“Imani” means faith

This intimate film from Uganda uses very simple means to tell the story of three people. Over the course of a single day we learn the story of – Mary, a cleaning lady, whose sister is beaten by her husband, little Olweny from a resocialisation centre for child-soldiers and Armstrong, a hip-hop dancer, who works with children from the slums organising dance shows.

For each of the characters, this day in some way brings a breathrough and poses a challenge. Mary has to help her sister Ruth, who after yet another fight is accused of having killed her husband. Olweny – once kidnapped from his village – returns to his family after a couple of years. Also Armstrong, along with his dancers, returns to the place he originally came from – to the middle of the slums – to organize a dance show. 

The first slow shots, which present the characters in the company of their friends or family, become increasingly dymnamic as the plot develops. Evil lurks in the corners, waiting for them and taking on different forms: Olweny’s macabre memories, as he is once again plucked out of the safe surroundings of his guardians; Mary’s dishonest “helper”, who cheats and takes advantage of her, or Armstrong’s old friend from the slums, currently the boss of a gang, whom the young man has to face.

These three engrossing stories never interweave, but all of them together create a portrait of contemporary Uganda, sketched with great subtlety by director Caroline Kamya. We follow the characters, letting ourselves become carried away by the music, from ethnic music to hip-hop, beautifully interspersed into the action of the film, and observe an Africa of contrasts – a jigsaw of poor villages and the rich suburbs of Kampala, where Mary takes care of the home of the wealthy, the mysterious labirynth of slums and clay huts of Olweny’s parents. Especially worthy of mention is the unbelievably good acting of almost all of the actors, who were capable of expressing a wide palette of emotions using sparse forms of communication.

Caroline Kamya, along with the scriptwriter, her sister Agnes, gently touch upon the subject of the problems facing contemporary Africa: the position of women and how they are treated by men, poverty and crime among the youth, or the demons of war which constantly return in the form of memories or in the way in which Olweny’s father tortures himself, unable to forgive himself that he could not save his son from being kidnapped, finally falling into alcoholism. Simultaneously, the main characters are shown in such a way that we have the impression that they will somehow come out victorious. Maybe this is because they are surrounded by love and the reciprocal care of their nearest and dearest. Or maybe because we can see the good and determination they have within them. Or maybe it is precisely because “imani” means faith.

By Keith Shiri

This assured first feature from one of East Africa’s most talented women filmmakers deals with three parallel stories in the course of a single day in Kampala and its environs. The beautifully crafted drama takes us into the lives of three characters: a former child soldier, a maid and a hip hop dancer. Mary (Rehema Nanfuka) is an independent young woman who returns from a village to a wealthy suburb in the Ugandan capital, where she works as a maid for a rich couple, while also having to take responsibility for her sister, who is in an abusive relationship. Olweny (Stephen Ocen) is a traumatised 12-year-old, returning home from a rehabilitation centre where he had been recovering after four years soldiering in the bush. Armstrong (Philip Buyi) is a talented dancer and DJ with a turbulent past, who plans to return with his group to the city slums to stage free dance performances, but is confronted by the dodgy characters of those he had left behind. The wide panoramas of the diverse settings and the complexities of all the characters are simply conveyed, while a soundtrack blend of both contemporary and traditional music maximises the film’s charm.

Review 1  Seattle Paper “The Stranger” by Charles Mudede

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/art-house/Content?oid=4236304

REVIEW 1

One of the many impressive sequences in Imani, a film by Ugandan director Caroline Kamya, happens at the beginning of the third act. An elderly black African man is a passenger on a motorbike that’s heading deeper and deeper into the slums of Kampala. He is traveling from his employer’s home in the affluent quarters of the city to the home of a woman who buys cold and hot merchandise from the most desperate people in the city. He arrives at the buyer’s home, announces he has something to sell, is led into the living room, takes a seat, pulls a gold necklace from his

pocket (“made of gold in Dubai”), and hands it to the buyer. As the buyer examines the necklace, we notice that the living room walls are covered with mass-produced portraits of a white (almost Scandinavian) Jesus. As the two very black Africans haggle about the price, 30 or so very white Christs crowd the walls. Indeed, the only whites or Europeans in this film are either in pictures or flat-screen TVs.

In one sense, the film is about black skin, its unexplored (or rarely explored) textures and tones. The lighting and cinematography, which are by Andrew Mark Coppin, bring to the surface of the screen the sculpturality of the black face. In some scenes, we lose the course of the story and find ourselves exploring the slope of a nose or the summit of a chin. In another sense, the film is also about the Red One camera. This new technology is able to penetrate one of the poorest societies on earth (according to Wikipedia, just over 50 percent of Ugandans live “slightly below the international poverty line of US $1.25 a day”) and connects its black bodies, black villages, black slums to the powerful circuits of the global image industry. And now the poorest Africans can look as beautiful, as stunning as the richest Europeans. The Red is taking us to the promised land of democratic representation.

Lastly, Imani is about the near-non-narrability of postneoliberal space. The three stories in the film are not fixed but float and dissipate like gases. And is this not the condition of Gilles Deleuze’s control society? A world that has transformed all stable things (factories, schools, stories) into “a spirit, a gas”? Imani is the most important film to come out of Africa since Tstosi. Harvard Exit, Fri June 11 at 4:30 pm.

REVIEW OF IMANI AT THE SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Imani vibrantly captures three vignettes of life in modern day Uganda: A child soldier returning to the parents who could not protect him, a woman fighting to get her wrongly accused sister out of jail, and a youth dance troop leader struggling to simply get through a hometown performance. These seemingly disparate stories slowly fuse into a profound singular narrative as the characters reveal themselves to be uniformly off balance in their own lives, and the world around them. Caroline Kamya’s fast and confident directing effortlessly makes the most of the beautiful Ugandan setting. With a rich and varied soundtrack, and the restless energy of the dancers it follows, Imani sprints by at the pace of a far less substantial film. Kamya’s unadorned approach to her characters and the film’s straightforward and unflinching script, provide an intimate exploration of characters who will likely remain far from resolution for some time to come.