La Dame de Katwe

This film tells the story of a teenage girl from a Ugandan ghetto. She is discovered by a chess teacher to be brilliant in chess, and hence she embark on a journey on international chess championships to lift her out of the ghetto.

"Queen of Katwe" tells a story that inspires people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Phiona and her family struggles to make ends meet, and yet she does something that is not conventionally economically active. The hardship of living in a ghetto is well depicted in the film, especially in the eviction scene and the car accident scene. The story is touching, especially when it tells how Phiona is under pressure. I notice how they depict Phiona under pressure during a chess game, and the opponents looking confident by staring fiercely into Phiona. This adds dimension to the story.

From the trailers one would guess that The Queen of Katwe is the typical formulaic and inspirational sports story, but it is much more. While segments of it are the same old story told and retold so beautifully, with a few unexpected twist and turns, is also a study of how success affects family ties and how character is king, even in the grim slums of Uganda. It offers a realistic and harshly honest, for a Disney film, look at Africa, with prostitution references and poor medical care reoccurring throughout the story. While the harsh environment might not make the viewer feel good, it makes the story all the more inspiring. The cinematography is excellent, with great shots of the children reacting to a world they had never seen before, be it an upper crust school, snow or the view from a airplane window. Great performances from the cast.

I highly recommend The Queen of Katwe.

A film with a warm heart and good intentions may be at risk of misrepresenting itself a little. A true life sports film (if we count chess as a sport) that hits all the beats of the typical sports film whilst pulling off the neat trick of being accessible to all ages but not soft-selling the realities of poverty pf the complex issues of what it means to seek to move upward on society in such circumstances. It's never not fun, and though the two central actors take most attention, the real prizes should go to the largely untested local cast who embody and exude their roles beautifully. It's a genuine, kind-spirited film that deserves wider attention.

Mira Nair previously focused on Uganda in 1991's "Mississippi Masala" (about an Indian family forced into exile by Idi Amin). "Queen of Katwe" is the true story of Phiona Mutesi, who started playing chess to get out of Kampala's slums. Katwe is the sort of place where you have to bribe people to do even minimal tasks. Lupita Nyong'o plays Phiona's mother, the sort of person who knows the slums all too well and isn't thrilled with her daughter's goal.

One of the most effective scenes is when the Katwe children compete against the students of King's College: the Katwe children wear the traditional Ugandan attire while the rich children wear western clothes, showing the disconnect between the social classes (a scene towards the end of "Mississippi Masala" showed something similar: when the father returns to Uganda, he looks westernized while the Ugandans wear the traditional clothes).

Admittedly, I don't know how accurate the movie is, especially since I had never heard of the story before the movie's release. Nonetheless, it's a powerful, uplifting story. The people involved in this movie deserve ample recognition for their contributions, and I hope that it draws more attention to Phiona Mutesi's achievements.

Mira Nair returns to Uganda once again, three decades after she made Mississipi Masala. This is a much better film. While Mississipi Masala centered around an upper middle class Indian-Ugandan family, Queen of Katwe is set in the slums of Uganda. Nair doesn't attempt to go easy on the slum visuals here. The filth and squalor are in your face here, from beginning to end. I haven't seen a film depicting poverty in this way for a long time. Even Slumdog Millionaire wasn't so strong. Otherwise Queen of Kawate is a fairly predictable story of an under-privileged girl rising to success against the odds. The medium of her rise is chess. She's the pawn who turns into a queen, as sometimes happens in chess. The performances are uniformly good, especially given that most of them are child actors (Mira Nair's first film was Salaam Bombay and she is pretty good at handling children). I found the end credits rather moving, where the real characters pose with the actors who played them on screen. All in all a very warm, watchable film.