Wakaliwood and the loudest cheap films on earth
How a studio in Wakaliga made action films on almost no money, and why the rest of the world noticed.
In Wakaliga, a neighbourhood on the edge of Kampala, there’s a film studio with no studio. The sets are whatever street is free that day. The guns are welded together from scrap metal. The actors are neighbours, and the neighbours are the crew. This is Ramon Film Productions, better known around the world as Wakaliwood.
The man with the camera
Isaac Nabwana, who signs his films Nabwana I.G.G., founded the studio in 2005. He loved action films and wanted to make his own, so he did, with whatever equipment he could get and a cast who would do anything for a shot. The films were made for local audiences first.
In 2010 he made Who Killed Captain Alex? Its budget was reported at under $200. Producer Alan Hofmanis has put the figure at about $85. It’s an hour of commandos, gangsters, kung fu and helicopters that are very obviously drawn on a computer, and it’s one of the most purely entertaining films ever made in Uganda.
The VJ
To understand Wakaliwood, you have to understand the VJ. In Kampala’s video halls, foreign films were often shown with a “video joker”: a live narrator who talked over the film, translating, explaining and, above all, making jokes. The VJ turned watching a film into a shared, noisy, communal event.
Wakaliwood builds the VJ into its films. VJ Emmie narrates every release, hyping up the fights and mocking the villains as the action happens. His voice is as much a part of the films as the actors. Watching Wakaliwood without the VJ is like watching football with the sound off.
The world finds Wakaliga
The trailer for Captain Alex went viral online. Viewers who had never heard of Ugandan cinema were suddenly quoting it. Alan Hofmanis, a film programmer from New York, saw it, travelled to Wakaliga, and stayed. He became an actor, a producer and Wakaliwood’s champion abroad.
In March 2015 the full film went up for free on the studio’s YouTube channel, where it has since passed ten million views. That same year a Kickstarter campaign to build a proper action studio raised more than $13,000 from fans around the world. In 2016 Bad Black, a bigger and more ambitious Wakaliwood film, won the audience award at Fantastic Fest in Texas, one of the best-known genre festivals in the world. In 2021 a documentary about Nabwana and Hofmanis, Once Upon a Time in Uganda, premiered at the same festival.
Why it matters here
It’s easy to treat Wakaliwood as a joke the internet is in on. That misses the point. Nabwana built a working film industry in his own neighbourhood, with his own community, telling the kind of stories he wanted to see, and found an audience in the millions without anyone’s permission or money.
That’s the lesson worth taking from Wakaliga. You don’t need a big studio or a festival to tell you your work is worth making. You need a camera, people who believe in it, and the nerve to put it in front of the world.
Start with Captain Alex. It’s free, it’s an hour long, and it’s the most fun you’ll have this weekend. Read our review, then see our guide to Ugandan films you can watch right now.