Category Archives: East Africa

The Revealed Truth Part 3: Good Samaritans

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Even though it’s not a speaking role, my friend Godfrey does a great job getting into character as the leper.  Godfrey was one of my students at the local secondary school.  He is also one of the most extraordinary individuals I know.  After both of his parents and two of his siblings died of AIDS when he was 13, Godfrey took over the family farm.  Child-headed households are common in Kiwangala, but Godfrey is different because has always taken on the hardship with an entrepreneurial spirit.  Even though he’s in the field every morning and evening doing the work of four people, he’s still one of the top students of his class.  He also sells the bananas and the sugarcane that he grows at the school canteen.  He’s active in athletics, the church, and drama as you can see here.  Last year he was featured in a movie I made about World AIDS Day.  Godfrey is an inspiration to never give up.  He even convinced me to buy 100 kgs of popcorn kernels that he popped up and passed out at The Reveal Truth premier.

One of the pivotal scenes in Part 3 is when Jesus counsels Nicodemus and convinces him to be born again.  If you want to go to heaven you must first be saved, He says.  Working in community development I partnered with many faith-based organizations and attended their services on Sunday.  Often the lessons of the Bible would be eclipsed by calls from the pastor in his sermon to recruit new members of the church.  When the Ugandans found out that I was not Born Again they aggressively tried to save me.  On one of the numerous occasions, I was in a parked car with a church member waiting for a thunderstorm to die down outside.  We were making conversation to pass the time. One thing led to another and all of a sudden he was trying to save me.  The more I resisted the worse it got.  I felt like I was on a bad date at the drive-in.  The rain couldn’t stop quick enough.

Christianity is relatively new to Uganda.  One young woman, who was working on The Revealed Truth, became Born Again when she was a teenager.  When her animist practicing parents found out, they chased her out of the house and disowned her.  Nowadays, almost all Ugandans identify themselves as being Christian or Muslim and publicly denounce the traditional tribal religions.  However animism is still practiced beneath the surface.  Someone who is sick may go to the health clinic during the day, pray for a miracle in church in the evening, and secretly visit the witchdoctor in the middle of the night.  There are regular reports of child sacrifice.

Obviously missionaries have a lot to do with with Uganda’s religious fervor.  They are responsible for a large portion of the country’s humanitarian development work and nobly live out in the bush with the most impovrished.  However, their gifts come with a trade off.  Their mission is to recruit more Christians.  Many are eager to sign up, but for what?  A new religion or to receive foreign aid?

Despite my criticism of the Born Agains, I think that the religion does help to purify the souls of Uganda.  The Masaka district has been hit hard by spells of bad luck, most recently with AIDS, but also with war.  During the civil war in the 1980s both sides fought with child soldiers.  I’ve met a few that have grown into adults.  It has been suggested to me that by being Born Again they can finally step away from their old lives of violence and the circumstances they were forced into, and start fresh.  Being Born again gives them the psychological release to control their destiny.

Finally, I’d like to have a look at the woman pumping water from the well.  This is a little b-roll that I shot to introduce the Good Samaritan scene.  This is actually where I collected my drinking water during the dry season when the rainwater tank down the street was empty.  I’d carry two 40 liter jerrycans one and a half miles from this borehole to my house. It was easier to carry two rather than one because two gives you balance, plus it’s a good workout.  Eventually I found a man who delivered water to me for 13 cents a jerrycan.  He told me that he makes more money that way than he did as a teacher.  The majority of the population doesn’t have indoor plumbing and so the village waterhole becomes the center of social life.  Water’s fetched mostly by women and children who carry it back home on their heads.  The lady you see here wearing a traditional gomezi dress comes for water at least once day.  Nothing has changed in the 2000 years between her and the Samaritan woman except that the hollowed out gourd has become a plastic jerrycan.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the fourth of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour  long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature Judas.


The previous post was The Revealed Truth Part 2: Cross Culture Shock.

The Revealed Truth Part 2: Cross Culture Shock

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The crowd gathers as the play gets going.  Not many people can afford cars, but many have bicycles.  This is a parking lot for them and the kid in the suit on the left is the valet.  The bags slung over the bikes are for collecting corn, bananas, or firewood.  After the show, the audience will peddle back into the fields to harvest their crops as the sun goes down and it’s not so hot.  The generator in the foreground powers the sound system.  The speakers were so loud that the play could be heard from miles around.  This was not unusual for the village.  Ugandans love blasting music, public service announcements, and sermons over their P.A. systems at all times of the day and night.

Part 2 of The Revealed Truth opens up with a shot of the Kiwangala playground.  That’s my neighbor Vieney and his sister clowning around.  The playground plays host to soccer matches, concerts, religious services, and once on Christmas there was a motocross rally.  On slow days cattle graze the field.

One thing that I’ve never understood is why Jesus speaks into a microphone.  It’s not plugged in.  A CD of the audio I recorded is playing on the speakers.  The actor playing Jesus is just mouthing the words.  Nevertheless, he carries the microphone all the way up to the cross, stopping like a talk show host to to interview saints and sinners along the way.

I remember going out one night in Masaka, the city closest to Kiwangala, to watch some karaoke.  In Uganda you don’t get up to sing something embarrassing, you let the professional entertainers handle that.  The music came on and performers gave it all they got with choreographed dance moves.  It was high energy, but it was also Milly Vanilli.  The singers lip-sync into turned-off microphones.  False advertising or not that was their style.  The microphone is an aesthetic prop that makes The Revealed Truth just a long karaoke number.

Something else that perplexes me in this bit is when the disciples gather fruit from the trees on the Sabbath.  The actors reach up into the branches and pull out a loaf of bread.  Why not fruit?  Uganda is a garden of Eden for tropical fruit.  It grows everywhere in abundance.  Ugandan bread, on the other hand, is nothing to write home about.  It’s bland and, because the nearest bakery is 40 km away, often stale.  However, while most fruit is cheap or even free, you’ve got to have cash to buy a loaf of bread.  In some circles of village society it’s a sign of wealth.  When a guest comes over for morning tea the hospitable thing to do is offer them a few slices of bread spread with Blueband margarine.  While the first appearance of bread is odd, it’s a theme that naturally weaves itself throughout the play up to the Last Supper.   It’s just bizarre watching it from a Western perspective where the value system is reversed.  If you walked into an American supermarket and bought a pineapple it’d be twice the cost of a loaf of Wonderbread.

Another surprising sight in the movie are the two men walking into the bushes holding hands.  Like many agricultural societies, Uganda is conservative in its behaviors.  PDA between couples raises eyebrows.  Outside of Kampala, kissing and hugging are never seen.  A man and a woman holding hands insinuates that they have carnal knowledge of each other.  Hand holding between members of the same sex however is acceptable and common.  It’s a show of fraternal goodwill, but it would make me do a double take when I passed by two burly biker dudes or a couple of coeds on their way to campus.  Often when I’d meet a man and shake his hand a game would start to see how long we could hold onto each other.  This makes introductions long and leaves you with sweaty palms, but also builds trust and rapport.

Nobody sees this behavior as gay because in Uganda homosexuality is illegal.  Earlier this year the parliament attempted to pass a bill that would give convicted homosexuals the death penalty.  It has been said that American evangelists lobbied parliament to put the bill into place.  Luckily, it caught the attention of the international community who threatened to withdraw humanitarian aid if the law was passed.  The MPs have since backed down, but the homophobic sentiment remains.  It’s ironic that the camera captured Jesus and the two men in the same frame.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the third of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour  long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature Nicodemus.

The previous post was The Revealed Truth Part 1: Shepherds and Fishermen.

The Revealed Truth Part 1: Shepherds and Fishermen

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The Archangel Gabriel rouses the shepherds awake, but the cows in the background are not part of the scene. A herdsman decided to graze them in the field while he watched the performance.  During filming, the Biblical world of the play often blurred with the rural life of the village where it was performed. More examples can be found in the nativity and fishermen scenes in the video below.


The Nativity

Most of the nativity scenes that I’ve seen usually substitute a doll for Jesus, but in Kiwangala it’s not so hard to strive for authenticity in this department.  Seven of us in the cast and crew got in a saloon car and drove a few kilometers out of the trading center.  The road quickly turned from a potholed monstrosity into a single-lane, dirt path.   This is no problem for Ugandans who drive small sedans.  They tackle terrain that soccer moms with 4×4 SUVs in the U.S. would never dream of attempting.  Twenty minutes later and deep in a banana plantation we parked in front of a small shamba.  A farmer and his wife were drying coffee beans out front.  A newborn baby was napping in the shade.  Around the back were cows, sheep, and a manger.  Naturally, things fell into place quickly.  It was just a matter of putting the baby in the trough.

The Music and Animation

As the shepherds visit Jesus they sing a traditional Christian folk song.  As I was recording the dialogue for this scene, the cast spontaneously burst into this song.  When you’re recording something in a language you don’t fully understand you tend to zone out and focus on the technicalities of the mixing.  When the actors started singing I immediately became alert and got goosebumps.

The reprise plays over a fish animation.  I bought a whole tilapia on market day for $1.50 from a man selling them out of a basket on the back of his bicycle.  After photographing the fish for the movie I wrapped it in banana leaves and cooked it over hot coals.  It was delicious.

The Fishermen

The fishing village where we filmed is one of many landing sites in the Rakai district.  They dot down the coast of Lake Victoria to the border of Tanzania.  While they are little more than shantytowns these villages have an infamous reputation.  As early as 1982, entire communities in the area had become sick with a mysterious illness called silimu, or in English “slim”.  Perfectly healthy people would get really skinny and drop dead.  At first witchdoctor juju was blamed, but eventually scientists arrived from the west, backtracking Patient 0,  and diagnosed the disease as HIV.  Landing sites like Kasensero became the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Over the last twenty eight years there has been a marked improvement and drops in infection rates, but the toll the disease has taken is still visible.  As a result, people live a primitive existence in mud walled homes and depend on the lake for their subsistence.

The video footage is a little shaky.  I was shooting from a fishing boat that kept tipping precariously from side to side.  I had to wade through the lake to board the vessel and as a result contracted schistosomiasis.  Yet, in retrospect it was worth it.  Shooting this scene was a special moment for me as a filmmaker.

The lack of economic development at the landing-site reinforces the literalness of the passion play.  The fishermen know what the apostles went through.  They’ve experienced the same anxieties of not coming home with a full catch.  If they caught as many fish as the apostles do in the movie, it would be the equivalent of winning the lottery.

However much the landing-site is in harmony with the life of Jesus, the real world still creeps into the film.  Jesus performs his miracle from a boat with an outboard motor and modern technology breaks our suspension of disbelief.

Likewise, filming unintentionally captured the sordid moments of the people in the village.  Near the end of the scene, a man and a woman can be seen quarreling in the background.  The woman runs into the field as Jesus comes ashore.  The man, who seems to be holding a knife, chases her down and drags her out of the frame.  The preaching of Christian values juxtaposed against the backdrop of domestic violence is a theme that will repeat itself later in the movie.

The Revealed Truth Blog Series

This post is the second of a nine part series that takes an in-depth look at the The Revealed Truth and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.  The  movie is about an hour  long  but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.  The next post will feature the teachings of Jesus.

The previous post was The Revealed Truth: An Introduction.

Sketchbook 2008-2010

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This is the culmination of my sketches from the last two years. The book in which I drew them is pretty beat-up from my travels so it’s going into storage. I’ve digitized these for posterity. I like drawing because it’s not as conspicuous as taking out a camera. The medium has helped me to capture scenes from everyday life in places that are sensitive to being recorded. It’s also helped to break the ice on a number of occasions. I might not always share the same language as my subject, but the sketchbook has provided another mode of communication.

Far from being a luddite, I’ve always marveled at emerging technologies in media. However, paper and ink has a tangible subjectiveness that mechanical-aided design will never quite achieve. Also, when I didn’t have electricity and the batteries on my camera and laptop went dead, my sketchbook still worked every time I opened it.