Wakaliwood Debuts Colonial-Restitution Superhero Film — SkimNews
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- Wakaliwood, the Kampala studio founded by Harriet Nakasujja and Isaac Nabwana, debuts "Kibuuka Omumbaale" — a 40-minute superhero film now showing at London's Chisenhale gallery — as its first work targeting an international, specifically British, audience.
- The film is named after Kibuuka Omumbaale, a mythical warrior of the Buganda kingdom whose relics were removed by an Anglican missionary to Cambridge University in 1906 and returned to Uganda the year before independence in 1962.
- The studio's breakout hit "Who Killed Captain Alex?" was reportedly made for a few hundred dollars, with helicopter gunships, shootouts, and kung fu showdowns staged using scrap-built props and desktop special effects.
- Wakaliwood's 2017 inclusion in Germany's Documenta art festival brought higher production value; the studio used the resulting funds to install fibre-optic cables in its neighbourhood.
- The new film layers two simultaneous soundtracks — conventional audio plus a live "video joker" voice offering running jokes and commentary — drawing on Kampala's tradition of live VJ narration, with this iteration marking Kampala's first English-language VJ.
- The film blends influences from Cantonese kung fu to Hollywood popcorn cinema while tackling contemporary Ugandan issues like corruption, femicide, and inequality alongside the ethics of precolonial history and colonial artefact removal.
- The film is screened without frills on a screen before painted bleachers, and the review notes the makers are acutely aware that showing in Britain echoes the country's long history of removing and exoticising Ugandan cultural artefacts.
Why it matters: This commission marks a deliberate pivot for Wakaliwood — from neighbourhood audiences to the very institutions implicated in the colonial looting its film addresses. By staging Kibuuka Omumbaale at a London gallery, the studio turns the act of restitution into a confrontation on European turf, giving a Ugandan folk hero international exposure while modeling how artists in the Global South can remix Hollywood and kung fu conventions into sharper political tools.
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