‘Queen of Katwe’ inspiring movie
WE SAY happy belated International Day of the Girl Child and well done to those girls who truly represented the rest at respective institutions and organisations on the day.
Yes, they had an opportunity to run the day. Who would not want that moment of fame?
Now we also want the boy child to be celebrated, I am not sure how best we can because boys seem to be left out, on the pretext that they are already on an upper ground.
So the Grade Sevens have finished their exams, meaning the holiday has just started.
We were saddened over the news that a Grade Seven pupil gave birth while in examination. What is this world going to? Who abuses such minors? Imagine the trauma and distraction caused not only to the young mother but obvious other young girls who witnessed this.
Please stay off to sex, abstinence is the way to go.
I won’t say much because the little ones still have a long way to go. They are now preparing for Form One.
To the Advanced and Ordinary-Level, we say the race has just started.
Good news, Ster Kinekor, Sam Levy Village will next week run a promotional, dubbed “Kids Fantasy Morning” to watch “Trolls”.
Yah, right this is a première for the latest kids movie which stars Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and Russell Brand among others. Hope to see you there. Our movie of the week is the “Queen of Katwe”, a new Disney film starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo which follows the rise of Phiona Mutesi, a poor girl from Uganda who becomes a chess prodigy.
Directed by Mira Nair, the film follows Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan girl living in the Kampala slum of Katwe who learns to play chess and quickly emerges as a prodigious talent despite not knowing how to read. Within a few years, she becomes good enough to play nationally — and then on a global stage.
Today, she’s one of the first two women from Uganda to earn the title chess players.
According to Atlanta, the movie begins in 2007: Phiona and her younger siblings live with their widowed mother, Nakku Harriet (played beautifully by Lupita Nyong’o), in a hut they can barely afford with the money they make from hawking maize.
Their community of Katwe is a desperately poor one, but Nair’s skilful directing finds the beauty in both the place and the lives of its inhabitants.
The film neither pities nor fancies their poverty and industriousness.
“How is your life, Phiona?” one neighbour cheerfully calls out to her by way of greeting early in the movie.
“It is fine,” she replies with a smile that suggests by “fine” she means not “okay” but “wonderful.”
Wonderful is an optimistic overstatement, to be sure.
Phiona only comes across a children’s chess club run by a local Christian ministry because she’s hungry, and they have free porridge.
The other children aren’t kind to her at first, but their teacher, Robert Katende (played by David Oyelowo), welcomes her, saying, “This is a place for fighters.”
Phiona’s curiosity is piqued when her peers begin to explain why they like the game so much. “In chess”, one boy says, “the small one can become the big one.”
The David-and-Goliath metaphor is just one of many “Queen of Katwe” uses to sum up the existential appeal of chess: The game doesn’t care how strong or rich you are, but it can teach you to strategise your way to a better life.
In other words, it’s about power and escape.
It’s no surprise that Phiona commits to practicing her game wholeheartedly, soon becoming the club’s best player under Katende’s dogged mentorship.
The movie is loosely structured around her rise — through local tournaments, countrywide championships, the 2010 Chess Olympiad in Russia — and the many bureaucratic challenges she and her fellow teammates face. But in between these dramatic inflection points, “Queen of Katwe” carries out an intimate psychological and emotional study of its subject.
Nalwanga fully captures the ambivalence Phiona feels as she improves her game and eventually gains international attention for Uganda. At times, Phiona sees her talent as a weapon, as a way to knock her smug, wealthy opponents down a couple pegs. Other times, it brings little more than anxiety and self-doubt. The film wisely stops short of selling Phiona’s chess genius as some kind of golden ticket out of Katwe, and takes care to spend time with Nyong’o’s character, who tries to protect her daughter from danger and disappointment, while keeping their family afloat.