Wakaliga at Kunstmuseum Luzern

For whom does one make a film? Certainly for oneself, but the motivations of Isaac Nabwana, founder of Ramon Film Productions aka Wakaliga, were initially focused on his people of the slums of Kampala. He wanted to make films for them, and with them, both starting and remaining there, in the poorest neighbourhood of the city. More than a “house” of production, we should imagine a “room” of production: his own room, soon welcoming a specific family – the one with Queen Harriet of Wakaliwood, pillar of the production – and the cinema family of the whole of Wakaliwood. Yes, Wakaliwood, because Wakaliga’s productions were organised with the intelligence of an industry and quickly became quite prolific.

The secret of this impressive capacity of production though is in the joy they collectively have in appropriating the basic grammar of cinema, fundamentally made of action and illusions. One can feel the energy of the Meliès’ or Feuillades of the dawn of cinema… A pervasive presence of green screens, illusory tricks, and hand-made special effects, together with the art of foley, turn filmmaking into a magical practice, one that allows the staging of shootings, explosions, blood, etc. with accurate preparations for the fight scenes, where martial arts serve to mimic the Rambos, the Bud Spencers, the Chuck Norris’ or the Bruce Lees. Here is not the question of choosing a style or a specific reference in cinema; also, the abundant use of camera movements and zoom has to be seen as a tool of empowerment, as if they wanted to say – to themselves and to the world – “look at what is possible to do, look what we can do!”

A confirmation of this empowerment poetic is that, contrary to many Hollywood movies and to the “cinema of attractions” of the first movies, Wakaliga’s productions don’t remain trapped in the sole pleasure of showing the artifices of cinema but frame their cinematic fireworks in a drama or a comedy that convey more than a cheap, consensual moral. Hyper-dramatization and humour notwithstanding, we can always feel the urgency of telling a story of violence and corruption. Their films become witnesses of an unjust society, and therefore therapeutical vehicles of denunciation and liberation.

This political line concerns the objectives of their film as well as its do-it-yourself aesthetic. The story of the evolution of this original experience is nothing less than a story of progressive self-thematization and self-celebration that expresses the consciousness of a style of filmmaking. If at the beginning, in 2005, their films maybe had this style simply out of necessity, they go on to define themselves more and more as done necessarily with this style, the style itself becoming a political statement. The emancipatory rhetoric against the «white-oriented corporate clan in Uganda» – as Queen Harriett tells me in our conversation – conflates with the revendication of the DIY aesthetic against the heavy costs of (white-oriented?) film productions. The story of the evolution of Wakaliga – from, let’s say, Bruce Lee to Zorro – is extremely interesting and worth considering, insofar as Wakaliga has landed now in a museum as an object of exhibition. What is the object though? The films themselves? Or how they are made, the meaning of their form, the history behind their productions?

The film Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010) marked the discovery of Wakaliga for an international audience, and fifteen years of international attention – from film festivals to museums (before the Kunstmuseum Luzern did, the Palais de Tokyo showed a film by Wakaliga within the project of the artist Louis-Cyprien Rials, Au bord de la route de Wakaliga) – certainly contributed to making Wakaliga more aware of its own style. A central figure for the international success of Wakaliga is the American Alan Hofmanis, fully integrated in the Ramon Film Productions, whose role of bridge between Uganda and the Western countries has been deftly analysed in Cathryne Czubek’s Once Upon a Time in Uganda (2021) – also showed in the exhibition rooms of Lucerne. This formidable documentation highlights the delicate balance between the desire of obtaining a broader, international audience, and the risk of becoming a victim of their standards. Alan is clear on this: «violence is a no-go for the Western people». Will this become an element of self-censorship for Wakaliga?

If we look at the most recent production, Rolex Time (2025), realised for the Kunstmuseum Luzern itself, we can say that Wakaliga keeps shooting in its own style. However we have to also consider that hyper-dramatization and humour come across differently when showed in a Western country. They seem to make us switch the emphasis from the political commitment of the stories that are told in the film to the amazing making-of, intentionally visible and working as an ode to amateurship and resilience. Amateurship and resilience are still political values, but do they distract us from the importance and meaningfulness of violence? Is the focus on the making-of a way of neutralizing the disturbing violence of Wakaliga? The project Wakaliwood versus the rest of the world. No one escapes Wakaliwood (2016-) fully assumes the thread of violence in expanding on the “punch the white guy-game”: through an ongoing series of sketches, white people, among which personalities of cinema (and the curator of the Kunstmuseum Luzern and of the exhibition, Eveline Suter, equally protagonist of the film Rolex Time), will be shot dead in Uganda. Again, is the open thematization of violence – with the hyper-dramatization and humour – another way to neutralize it through sublimating it on a symbolic level?

The exhibition of the Kunstmuseum Luzern is very generous, and gives us all the elements required to discover the “phenomenon” of Wakaliga and to follow its history. The evolution of the self-perception of this group of filmmakers, and the evolution of their artistic intentions and of their audiences, is an intriguing one, for which I wanted to mark out the risk of neutralizing the most disturbing and political aspects of their films. Be it through the focus on the making of their films or through the thematization and conceptualisation of violence within them, the exhibition format cannot but enhance this risk of putting the force of their stories at a certain distance. Therefore, and also in order to avoid any patronising attitudes and any Rousseauian reduction to a cinematic noble savage, I will simply suggest to the Lucerne audience to dive into Wakaliga’s films by focusing on their stories, without second or third readings, even embracing their most distant or disturbing aspects. This will liberate the films themselves from the trap of pleasing the Western people, render them not disconnected from the slums of Kampala. I know, the making-of is very interesting, and so is the story of the film productions. However, please, go watch the films!