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Uganda will take a shot at hosting an international film festival on May 21 when it hosts the first Amakula Kampala International Film Festival, a 10-day event, in the heart of Kampala.

TThis comes ahead of the annual Zanzibar International Film Festival's Festival of the Dhow Countries (June 25-July 4) and African Cine Week of Nairobi (October 4-9) which will both be marking their 7th edition. Like the Zanzibari and Nairobi festivals, the Ugandan one also appears to be purely one of cultural showcasing without the commercial aspect of selling and buying audiovisual production rights. Experts contend that for a film event to be useful it should also offer opportunities for buying and selling rights to films as culture is increasingly becoming treated as an industry with South Africa recognising it as one of the biggest contributors to the economy.

Consequently, only the Pan African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) of Burkina Faso and the Southern African International Film and Television Market Initiative (Sithengi) of South Africa combine the showcasing of film with marketing. The curator of the maiden Ugandan event, art historian Alice Smits of the Netherlands, says the festival is aimed at helping connect the East African film community and develop a thriving cinema culture in Uganda.

The festival, to run May 21 - 30, will offer a wide range of screenings from all over the world in diverse locations within Kampala. While the festival will be centered in the National Theatre, Smits says, it will also appear in diverse locations including video halls and outdoors around Kampala. A few films have been translated into the widely used local Luganda language. In this regard of outreach, the festival is only rivaled by ZIFF.

Nairobi, although as old as ZIFF, is still along way behind. With focus on documentaries as the mother of films, the festival will also feature workshops, seminars and lectures. Local, regional and international directors and producers will host these programmes. It is heartwarming to note that Kampala is carving itself a niche in documentary films and thus establishing an enviable identity for Nairobi and Zanzibar to emulate. The Kampala programme will be divided into sections like the African Panorama (will screen films from Cameroon, Congo, Madagascar, Chad, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, and South Africa), East Africa, and Contemporary World Cinema (offering international films from France, India, Romania, Cambodia, Britain, China, Haiti, United States, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, The Netherlands and Sweden).

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Leonard Retel Helmrich will offer his "One Shot Theory" workshop on camera technique to aspiring and practising filmmakers; Balufu Bakupa-Kayinda will provide a seminar on the adaptation of new digital technologies in Africa while Jean Marie Teno will present a seminar on the documentary as an active social tool in African society; panel discussions on the future of cinema in East Africa, and the Status of African Cinema, will be held with local and regional speakers.

Among the speakers will be Manthia Diawara, a filmmaker and authority on African Cinema; and Dommie Yambo Odotte on the relationship between television broadcasting and film production in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Amakula Kampala International Film Festival is organised by Amakula Kampala Cultural Foundation with the assistance of Alliance Française, Makerere University, the Union of Video Hall Owners & Operators Association, Uganda Film and Television Institute, Ndere Centre, and Yole Africa with support from Stichting Doen, Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, Jan Vrijman Funds (The Netherlands), The Royal Dutch Embassy in Kampala, the American embassy, Alliance Française, Space Net, and Tezran Production. The festival is co-directed by American filmmaker Lee Ellickson and Smits.

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