malika_zouhali-worrall_and_katherine_fairfax_wrightToday is Human Rights Day around the world. I can’t think of a better time to watch Call Me Kuchu, an award-winning documentary by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall about the plight of the LGBT community in Uganda. With all the advancements we’ve seen with same-sex marriage and other gay rights issues in this country and around the world, it’s important to remember that there are still countries in which being gay is a crime with often very severe consequences. For the past several years, the Ugandan government has been debating a new Anti-Homosexuality Bill that, if passed, would make homosexuality punishable by death. In their powerful film, Wright and Zouhali-Worral document the struggles of the fledgling LGBT community in Uganda to fight this legislation and secure rights for gays and lesbians. The film profiles veteran activist David Kato, Uganda’s first openly gay man or “kuchu,” as he joins forces with retired Anglican Bishop Christopher Senyonjo to defeat the state-sanctioned homophobia. Throughout their tireless work, we see the endless persecution they must endure in their daily lives. But no one in this circle is prepared for David’s brutal murder that shakes the movement to the core and sends shock waves around the world.

The Ugandan legislation, dubbed the “Kill the Gays” bill, also requires prison time for people who fail to turn in known homosexuals, even if they are members of their own family or their students or members of their congregation. Inspired by American evangelicals who have led huge prayer rallies in Uganda to foment their anti-gay views and consider that country “ground zero” in their war on the “homosexual agenda,” the bill has not yet passed, thanks partly to increasing international pressure against it. But it is likely to come up again in 2014. Just this week, former Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo put pressure on government officials to bring the bill to the floor of Parliament for a vote. I sat down with the two directors of Call Me Kuchu in Los Angeles.

callmekuchu-posterDanny Miller: David Kato is such an inspirational subject — I think everyone who sees this film can’t help but fall in love with him. Was it meeting him that led you to want to make a film about the current plight of gays and lesbians in Uganda?

Malika Zouhali-Worrall: There’s a transgender LGBT activist named Victor Mukasa who has been one of the most prominent activists there. We had heard about this case that he was involved in as a result of a violent police raid on his home several years ago. Victor decided that he wasn’t going to let it pass and he sued the Ugandan Attorney General in a Ugandan Court and won his case!

Wow, that’s pretty miraculous considering what’s going on in that country.

Exactly. I think it’s very easy for us to have oversimplified views of developing countries and their democracies but it was amazing to hear that Uganda had a judiciary that was independent enough to recognize that LGTB people have constitutional rights, too. They have a very robust constitution that’s relatively well enforced, but at the same time these sodomy laws are on the books and then the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was introduced. Victor appears in the film briefly but by then he was living mostly in Capetown. We’d actually started speaking to David Kato just a short while before the bill was introduced. He warned us about it and it immediately became clear that we needed to tell that story and his efforts to fight it.

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There was also the case of the outing of gay people in the virulently anti-gay Ugandan newspaper called Rolling Stone (no relation to the American publication). I know as documentarians you have to remain objective when you’re interviewing your subjects but was it challenging to sit through all of Rolling Stone editor Gilles Muhami’s scurrilous rhetoric that we see in the film?

Katherine Fairfax Wright: To be honest, it was less difficult listening to him in that interview than it was attending the services led by the anti-gay American pastors. Those seemed so much angrier.

Malika: It’s true. We were just one-on-one with Gilles but at the service we were watching someone preaching this very scary stuff to a huge crowd.

How much did David’s shocking and tragic murder change the focus of the documentary?

Katherine: It was horrible. Obviously from a filmmaker’s perspective, a lot of decisions about the plot of the story were quickly made for us in the wake of his death. At first we wondered how we could carry on without our main protagonist. But then we saw how his death really galvanized the community in many ways. At David’s burial you see all these people wearing t-shirts with his photograph. It became a way for people to show that they identified with and cared about the kuchus. The problem was that those images were all over the news and because of that footage a lot of people were kicked out of their homes or lost their jobs. The community was severely shaken because the ultimate threat had been realized — one of them had been murdered. That made some people hesitant but it also made many others want to carry on in David’s name. It was very interesting to watch both of those tensions play off each other.

Did you worry about people putting themselves at risk by appearing in your film?

Yes, it’s certainly a conversation we had many times. The film won’t be released in Uganda but with the Internet we obviously can’t guarantee that it won’t get into the hands of authorities. So we always talked to people about the implications of their presence in the film. I think they all reached the conclusion that because they’ve already been outed on other people’s terms with vicious things written about them, they decided that they might as well do it on their own terms. They started to think of our project as a channel in which to do that.

I think sometimes when we hear of discrimination against the LGBT community in this country, we simplistically think they should just move to a bigger city or somewhere that’s more gay-friendly. That’s obviously not very easy for people in Uganda.

No, it’s not, and most of them have no desire to leave — they love their country! Many still have good relationships with their families or at least a lot of support and connections with the LGBT community. They’re educated and hard working and they want to stay in their country.

Malika: Many have friends who have left and they’ve seen how hard it is for them, often being relegated to some asylum seekers’ apartment complex. Most of them don’t have very good job prospects in these other countries. You basically move from being middle class to the lowest of the low, probably in a Nordic country because those are the most likely to give them asylum.

Is there still a lot of fear that the Anti-Homosexuality Bill will pass?

Katherine: Yes, and a lot of frustration. It could pass really soon, it could be put off for years, it could be chopped into bits and stuck into other legislation. Not knowing how it will play out is very stressful.

How much do you think international pressure against the bill prevented its passage so far?

It’s hard to say. I think petitions and statements from world leaders like President Obama definitely helps a lot but on the other hand I think it makes a lot of Ugandans focus on issues of sovereignty.

“Those foreigners aren’t going to tell us what to do!”

Right. It brings up all these issues of neo-colonialism.

Malika: With some people, that becomes the rallying cry. It’s almost become a matter of principle for some that Ugandans should have the right to pass that bill. And now many Catholic leaders have come on board to back the bill which is not good. In fact, more and more churches are backing it.

Did you try to sit down with any of the American evangelicals who were spreading their hateful anti-gay message in Uganda?

We made a conscious decision that we wanted to focus more on the activists. When we started the film the American evangelicals were getting all the attention in this story and we felt we didn’t need to add to that.

Katherine: And we also wanted things to rise organically within the narrative of the film as much as possible. We didn’t want to seem like we were creating this pastiche to fit our agenda. For us the most powerful argument was looking at the concurrent dynamics at play in the lives of these courageous, real individuals we were following who are constantly putting their lives on the line.

Click here to find out about upcoming screenings. Call Me Kuchu is also available on VOD and DVD.