Family Portraits: What We Remember

In many ways, this story is simple: a grandmother recounting her life and legacy to her granddaughter. Grandma Christine’s stories, slowly collected and documented over six years… between cups of tea.

In many ways, this story is one of a kind: Christine Wakhweya went to dinner parties with the menacing Ugandan dictator Idi Amin — he knew her name, he called her home, he plotted to kill her husband.

It is that duality that prompted me to share this story. Grandma Christine is my last surviving grandparent. It occurred to me, upon completing a graduate film program in 2017, that future generations in the United States would never have the chance to sit across from my grandma and hear our roots - to remember where we came from.

While the aggression of Amin's regime may have lent itself to an historical or expressly biographical documentary — my unique access, rich archival news footage and VHS home videos begged for a more personal telling. I also co-produced the majority of the score— and much of what you will hear is original instrumentation. Please note: this is work-in-progress(WIP)/near-final cut. Subtitles and updated animations will be incorporated, and archival footage will be cleared for premiere.

As you witness the final product, I hope to provide insight into the primary obstacles for this short film: distance, time and emotion.

On distance: It takes 20 hours of flying, two planes, 8 hours of driving, several thousand dollars and a handful of vaccinations to make it to Butiru, Uganda (and that’s assuming all your luggage and camera gear arrives with you).

On time: I see my grandmother once every three years, if I’m lucky. As time elapsed, each visit her hair was grey-er, her knees and hearing a bit weaker — though her memory was always sharp.

My time was also restricted, as I’m a news anchor for the number one daytime national TV program, and the duration of time I can take off is limited. I wanted to treasure the remaining years with my grandmother without filming through it. And, honestly, I didn’t want our remaining life together to be overwhelmingly marked by recounting trauma. In light of that — I decided to film over the course of several years, with multiple visits to Uganda, and one visit where she came to the United States.

That decision unexpectedly deepened my research. Documents from Amnesty International revealed that several members of the Wakhweya family had been tortured and killed by the Amin regime; gently preserved newspaper clippings corroborating my grandfather’s role in Amin’s cabinet. In expanding the length of the project, the story got to breathe…and so did we: I could put the camera down and just be with my grandma. As such, this story is mostly told through modest cinema verite vignettes and archival footage.

On the challenge of emotion: The biggest hurdle for this story was getting a broken family to come together and recount a traumatic history. There’s also a cultural barrier when it comes to being filmed — cameras have often been weaponized as a tool of surveillance in a country still reeling from a militarized regime and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Several surviving family members initially declined to be interviewed altogether.

In the face of understandable hesitancy, I made the artistic and practical choice of documenting the stories of other relatives orally. This is also an unconventional choice for a documentary film. In doing so, I believe the film rightly visually centers the family matriarch, the barrage of events swirling around her, and — in an ambient, almost passive way — allows the other family members to speak without distracting from the core messages and messenger.

To that end, it was of utmost importance to me to show this film to my grandmother before offering it to the world. In 2024, I did just that.

Upon watching the film, Grandma Christine exclaimed, “So this is what you’ve been doing!?” I couldn’t help but laugh. Culturally, there’s not a framework or a norm of filming people day to day… let alone for a film — and smartphones are a rarity. But, after the humor, she took pause.

I can only recount several times when I’ve seen my grandmother cry: always when we have to say goodbye and then… after she watched this film.

She said: “Wow, there’s a movie about me. Someone will see my story.”

Stories from the global south are rarely told on our newscasts and I’d offer the same is true of the silver and indie film screens. But I thank you for the opportunity to center this African story in your program. Truly, it's a story all of us can resonate with: the story of deep love, realized fears, the destruction that comes from authoritative governments not held to account; and, the faith you can choose to have in spite of it all.

Thank you for your consideration.