113 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | National Geographic Documentary Films
A Ugandan pop star decides to run for president against a man who has held power since 1986. Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp follow him from the concert stage to the prison cell to the hospital bed. The regime answers his songs with bullets.
Bobi Wine is Robert Kyagulanyi, a Ugandan musician who turns his fame into a political weapon. He runs for president in 2021 against Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the country since 1986. The film tracks the campaign from the slums of Kampala to the floor of parliament to the inside of military detention. Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp build the film around a simple collision. One man wants a vote. The state wants him gone.
Bobi Wine carries himself with the discipline of a performer and the calm of someone who has accepted the danger. He speaks to crowds in the cadence of his songs. He registers fear without surrendering to it. Barbara Kyagulanyi, his wife, is the film’s emotional spine. She holds the family together while her husband is beaten, jailed, and shot at, and the camera catches the exhaustion she never performs for anyone. Yoweri Museveni appears in official footage as a man fluent in the language of stability, and the film lets his own words convict him.
Bwayo and Sharp keep the camera embedded inside the campaign rather than observing from a safe distance. The handheld footage rides in the convoy as soldiers fire tear gas and live rounds into crowds. The editing cuts state television and Museveni’s speeches against the violence that happens off the official record. The sound design softens nothing. Gunfire, screaming, and the dead air of jammed phone lines build a portrait of a country squeezing shut. The proximity is the whole argument.
This is a film about what an entrenched regime will do to a man who refuses to be afraid in public. The election outcome is never the point. The point is the machinery, the soldiers, the courts, the propaganda, all of it aimed at one musician who will not stop singing. Bwayo and Sharp document that machinery without flinching and without narration telling the viewer how to feel. The footage does the work, and the work is damning.