Once Upon a Time in Uganda (2021)
I'll be honest: I came into this one expecting to be bored stiff. I'd already sat through Who Killed Captain Alex? and Bad Black, and neither of them did anything for me. I get why people go wild for Wakaliwood. A shoestring budget, an enormous ambition, and a genuine, unironic love for 80s action cinema rather than a knowing wink at it. But the films themselves just didn't land for me, full stop. So sitting down to watch a documentary about the very phenomenon I couldn't warm to felt like asking for trouble.
What I found instead was something far more engaging than I had any right to expect.
Cathryne Czubek's documentary isn't really about the films. It's about the people behind them, and more specifically about the peculiar, compelling relationship between Ugandan director Isaac Nabwana and Alan Hofmanis, the American who stumbled across Nabwana's work and promptly upended his own life to become its most fervent champion. Watching Hofmanis attempt to sell ultra-low-budget Kampala action movies to baffled Western festival programmers is, genuinely, a brilliant narrative thread. There's something both funny and quietly moving about a man throwing himself so completely into a cause that most of his peers can barely comprehend.
The gap between Nabwana's makeshift studio and the international arthouse circuit turns out to be a far richer subject than anything in the films themselves. It's a story about obsession, about cultural collision, about the sheer bloody-mindedness it takes to make anything creative when the odds are stacked against you. That human element is where the documentary really earns its place. The rubber machetes and green-screen helicopters were never going to win me over, but the people operating on a dream and very little else? That I can get behind.
That said, I'm not going to oversell this. As a piece of documentary filmmaking, it's really just fine. The pacing gets a bit ragged through the middle, and Czubek keeps things comfortably within feel-good territory when a bit more journalistic rigour would've served the story well. There's a broader socio-economic context to Uganda and its film culture that the film gestures at without ever properly committing to, and you occasionally feel the absence of that depth. It stays happily in the company of its eccentric subjects rather than asking the harder questions that might make for a more substantial film.
So where does that leave it? Entertaining, warm, and genuinely fascinating as a portrait of a niche cinematic world most people will never encounter. It succeeds in the very places its source material fails, finding the human story underneath the chaos and making you care about the outcome. But it's a bit lightweight, and it knows it. Czubek isn't pushing for profundity here. She's made something that goes down easy, which is fine, though you might find yourself wanting a bit more to chew on once the credits roll.
Three stars. A solid curiosity, and the best thing to come out of my Wakaliwood experience by some distance.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-07-19
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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