Hope conquers fear in ‘Queen of Katwe’
We’ve all seen movies where a poor kid uses an unlikely talent to escape to a better life. In “Stand and Deliver” it was calculus; in “The Blind Side” it was football.
In Disney’s new “Queen of Katwe,” a girl in a Ugandan slum thinks a board game could be her ticket out. Despite the long odds, these stories almost always have happy endings — but that doesn’t mean a mom can’t worry.
The apprehensive mother in the fact-based “Queen of Katwe” is played by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, who understands the risks of letting a child even begin to dream there’s a way out of poverty.
“You can open a child’s mind to another world, to other possibilities, but how do you ensure that they can achieve those things? And what happens when they have to deal with the disappointment of not being able to achieve those things?” Nyong’o says. “They are left in limbo, because the world that they have come from is no longer good enough, and the world that they are seeking to attain is not in their grasp.”
In the film, Nyong’o plays Harriet, the mother of young, illiterate Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga). Scraping out an existence by selling maize in the crowded city streets of Katwe, Phiona is all but resigned to her situation until she stumbles across a chess club run by Robert Katende (David Oyelowo). Chess creates a space where Phiona can dream — and that scares Harriet.
“Wanting to have a life outside of poverty is something that Harriet has not seen as possible as a woman in this community,” Nyong’o says, “so how can she possibly instill with confidence that dream in her daughter?”
As Phiona becomes a major player in the world of youth chess, her tournaments take her to places unimaginable to her mother. In the course of a day, Phiona can move from a luxury hotel with a swimming pool and an all-youcan-eat buffet back to a one-room house with no running water and not enough food. The trophies and medals, tangible signs of Phiona’s gift, seem to belong to a different world.
“You see the baby [brother] using a trophy cup as a plate, because they need a plate,” Nyong’o says. “You are constantly being faced with the impracticality of this pursuit.”
Nyong’o, who won an Academy Award for her performance as the enslaved Patsey in 2013’s “12 Years a Slave,” spoke with the real-life Harriet to try to understand why Phiona’s hope eventually overcame Harriet’s fear. She discovered it was something so simple that any mother could understand it. “Her first reason was Robert Katende provided [Phiona] with a cup of porridge every day” at the chess club, Nyong’o says.
Nyong’o appreciated the arc of her character. “She gets to a place where she realizes that her daughter’s life does not have to look like hers,” she says. “Her journey is one where she has to learn that the best way to show her daughter love is to act out of radical hope rather than out of fear.”