It is 3pm and on the set of an upcoming Ugandan film in Kasanvu and Aaron Zziwa Alone, the film director has been shooting this movie for the past six months. Much as he has been part of the industry for the past eight years, Zziwa has never been trained or schooled in filmmaking. Like many other local filmmakers, he is self-taught. by Andrew KaggwaWell, I have attended one-day film workshops with both Maisha and Kampala Amakula film initiatives, he says.
When he first joined the industry, shortly after graduating from Makerere University Business School in 2008, it was about the fact that he believed there was no job for him on the market. He had to look at the available options and that is when his passion for acting led him on. Being a graduate of Entreprenuership, Zziwa no longer looks at film as just a hobby but takes it rather seriously.
While on location, he makes actors redo one-minute scenes over eight times in a bid to get cutting-edge performance from them. His belief is that when people start realising the change in the quality of picture and acting, film in Uganda will shift to another level.
Today, he is angered by the fact that when he and his crew first visited this location, the mud and wattle houses were many in number.
And the trench that runs the dirty water was bigger and filthier, in all ways that was a perfect representation of an African slum. But today KCCA has relocated almost half of the kiosks and razed some of the illegal structure. Zziwa feels this has robbed the place of its authentic ghetto feel. Together with the crew, they embark on locating other sites nearby that would still portray the original picture he tried painting on the reel.
Despite being dressed in blue denims, moccasins and a white vest, Zziwa comes across as a composed and soft-spoken character. He describes himself as an actor, screenwriter and film director.
Today must be one of the hardest days though, because he is part of the scenes to be shot and must direct them as well. He, however, gives the reassurance that he is enjoying it.
I usually work with a co-director who is an actor. That person is in charge of directing my acting, he says.
As a writer, Zziwa says, you will always fight with the director not to change what you intended to portray. But if you are wearing the two hats, you can rest assured the story execution is safe, for acting - he just loves it. He has been part of over thirty projects as an actor, costume designer and director. These are mostly renowned projects such as the award-winning Patrick Sekyaya's I Found My Way, The Ugandan, Nafulu and The Last Drop, among others.
But besides working with Sekyaya, he has worked on projects such as The Debt and Perfect Gentlemen. Though it was his latest outing, it is The Superstition that got Ugandans talking. Originally done to appease NGO funding, The Superstition was packaged as a message film with very little entertainment.
In Uganda it is very hard and expensive to put a film out, thus many look out for topics that can be funded, points out Zziwa.
Nominations and awards
It was also at about this time that he met his now good friend, Paresh Gondaliya, a Ugandan Indian with a special dedication to local stories. He was burning with desire to tell a truly Ugandan story, says Zziwa, with a touch of excitement. This is when they collaborated to make The Superstition.
Gondaliya financed much of the production, and since Zziwa no longer needed NGO money, he felt there was no need to limit his script and went on to make it an entertaining movie with a message. The result was the epic picture that is still surprising Africa. Released on July 1, 2014, The Superstition has been nominated ten times for awards, more than any other local film released this year.
At the end of August, it picked up the award for Best Editing/Post Production at the second Uganda Film festival and went on to win Best Feature Film at the Arusha African Film Festival. It was nominated for Best Foreign Feature Film at the Abuja International Film Festival - only losing to Jackie Chan's Chinese Zodiac (the night's biggest winner). In fact, The Superstition was the only African movie in the category.
For me, a nomination was already a win. I felt honoured to be in the same category with such a big world icon [Jackie Chan], he says.
[Discussing with camera crew]
Discussing with camera crew
The film is already slated to screen at the UGU Film festival in South Africa and the Silicon Valley African Film festival in California, among others. Superstition is a fiction film about a man that had never even dreamt of being a father. He learns that he had fathered a child with a prostitute he slept with some years back. However, just as he was learning to love the boy, the child is kidnapped and ritually sacrificed.
Zziwa says his background, especially growing up in Mukono, inspired this story, though he also points to the fact that being part of the Nafulu team made him pay attention to the importance of telling an African story.
Talking to The Observer earlier this year, Gondaliya noted that he was interested in being part of the project since he had read way too many stories in the media about the evil of child sacrifice. Zziwa believes a good film should start with a good script, cast and a creative technical team. To ensure that his technical team gives him their best, he welcomes their decisions and experiments with them, even during shoots.
The Ugandan film industry, according to Zziwa, is growing quite fast.
People are demanding for quality which is a call for us to work harder.
He also thinks the industry needs honest distributors to help get the movies to the end user. He is also irked by the fact that despite the increasing number of cinemas across the country, there is no law governing them, especially when it c
