Ugandan group scoops film award

Aug 17, 2006

The recent ninth edition of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) saw a Ugandan-based group, Neolab Production winning the special prize category from UNICEF. UNICEF was the main sponsor for ZIFF 2006.

By Jude Katende

The recent ninth edition of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) saw a Ugandan-based group, Neolab Production winning the special prize category from UNICEF. UNICEF was the main sponsor for ZIFF 2006.

Neolab’s 44-minute winning documentary, Wild Sounds tells a story of hip-hop transcending borders.

The Munyonyo-based film-makers, Fabio Garcia from Colombia and Cyril Ducottet from France shot and directed the documentary. Wild Sounds features Ugandan hip-hop and traditional African music artistes fusing the two genres and coming up with a unique.

Every year, Alliance Francaise (AF) sends artistes to participate in the festival. This year 12 went. Four (hip-hop), one for reggae and others for traditional music including Kinobe, Emma Katya, Tshilla with Soul Beat Africa, among others.
Filmmakers, Cyril Ductotet and Shams Bhanji both born in Zanzibar, went with them. On one track, Tshilla rapped while Kinobe played the Adungu and Percussion Discussion Africa’s Sewanyana played local drums.

AF hopes to promote the film-makers, the films and the artistes as well. The film-makers make music videos, documentaries, shoot short films, TV commercials and video. Shams shot and edited Iryn’s Nkuweeki video.

Ducottet says most of his work is based on interactions with artistes.

The group has other movies in the pipeline including Saved by Smoke by Shams, Barwalaku from Petna and Ndaliko Katowdolo. They plan to shoot a documentary on hip-hop artistes fusing hip-hop with local music in Tanzania and Kenya. Ducottet said the Wild Sounds documentary took them three months to shoot. Next, they will embark on a feature film project whose scripts they are already through with.

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