Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Multi-faceted actor plays world of characters
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine is a New Hampshire native and a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda.
But he can easily make you believe he’s from either Chicago (“The Chi”) or Uganda (“Queen of Katwe”). Because he can play a refugee from the Angolan civil war in writer-director Ekwa Msangi’s “Farewell Amor,” you’d think the transformation from the son of academics and the grandson of an archbishop might be easy for him.
While the onscreen results are effortless, they weren’t achieved easily. For one thing, Angolans and Ugandans have little in common, culturally or even linguistically.
“Yes, they are (different), and (Msangi) knew. That’s why she chose to make the characters relocate to Tanzania, which is her homeland, although she grew up in Kenya as well,” says Mwine by Zoom. “We had a lot of work to do. Luckily, we had some real-life Angolans to rely on. Our choreographer was Angolan. I basically had him record all my lines, and I had an actor friend who’s also Angolan and had him record my lines as well.
“There was no Portuguese in the script originally, so we relied on those guys to change some of the phrases to add more layers of authenticity because these characters would not be speaking in English all the time.”
In “Farewell Amor,” Mwine plays an auto mechanic who reunites with his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah), and his daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) after 17 years in New York. The separation has been long, and while Mwine’s Walter is firmly established in New York, he and his family have become different people since they fled the Angolan Civil War, which lasted from 1975 to 2002.
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“It can be brutal. The way you’re seeing things, you could be bringing in your own insecurities and desires, and sometimes those desires and insecurities are so far apart that there’s this hard clash,” Mwine says.
“They haven’t been together physically for 17 years. They’re husband and wife, so they know they have to consummate the relationship again, so to speak. She takes the initiative and undresses and waits for him in the bed, completely naked. He’s just stunned when he sees her. That moment, that hesitation, was all it took for her to unravel.”
Adding to the tension is that he
has had an affair while Esther has been out of his life, which adds to the tension in the relationship. She has also dealt with the stress of her situation by becoming even more devoutly Christian, while he has let his faith slide.
“Religion has given her solace,” he says. “She’s found herself through religion, but also that religion is also what created distance between her and her husband. So, they’re having to re-find themselves through her faith, which becomes a big challenge for them.”
In addition, Mwine’s Walter is reticent to say what he’s really thinking, which makes reconciling with his wife and daughter even more challenging.
“He has a secret, basically. First of all, the mistress that he can’t really talk about, but I’m not sure how much he painted the picture of that when he’s living [with] his family. I don’t know if he told his daughter that she would have to be sleeping in the living room next to the kitchen table and that they’d be sharing, all three of them, this tiny apartment that was probably smaller than what they had when they were living in Angola or Tanzania,” Mwine says.
“They wouldn’t have the network of support that they probably had when they were back in Africa and that they’re having to navigate new landscapes, new culture, new racial dynamics. And that is sort of hinted at when Walter tells his daughter Sylvia that being a Black person in America is really difficult. But rather than burden her with all the hardships that come along with that, he tries to inspire her and tells her to not let anyone hold her back.”
“Farewell Amor” has personal resonances for Mwine because his brother had to flee to America from Uganda when he became HIV-positive.
“I wrote a play loosely inspired by his story, ‘Biro,’” he says. “He smuggled his way into the U.S. to try to get treatment. This was back in the time when there was no access to the medication where he was.”
Having worked on “Tremé,” “The Knick,” “Blood Diamond” and other TV shows and movies, Mwine has a long IMDb page. He has also had a lengthy career writing and directing in theater and in helming documentaries. He has even had photos published in Vanity Fair.
It’s tempting to wonder if someone with his experience might chafe working with less experienced filmmakers and directors like Msangi.
“There are some times you’re working with other directors, and you’re biting yourself not to direct the scene,” Mwine says. “I don’t think that was the case with Ekwa because when we met we’d both had our own short films at multiple festivals around the world. I’d fallen in love with her work, and I’d been pursuing her on how to connect and work together. She’d approached me to do the short version of ‘Farewell Amor,’ but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do that.”
Despite all the accents and transformations he has achieved so far, Mwine has never taken on a role whose experiences have mirrored his own. His mother has taught psychiatry and the University of Nairobi, and his father is a Harvard educated lawyer. He himself is a graduate of the NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has degrees from London, Moscow and the University of Virginia.
Curiously, no matter what accent he’s using, Mwine has always played blue-collar guys.
“Maybe that will be the next project I get to do is an academic or somebody with an intellectual bent,” he says. “I don’t think any of the characters I’ve played had their master’s degrees.”
“Farewell Amor” is available to rent or buy on various streaming platforms.