ROGERS ATUKUNDA
When Ugandan author and filmmaker Patricia Olwoch Aciro set out to tell a ‘prison story’, she drew inspiration from her personal experiences.
Her 7-minute short documentary My Prison Diary tells the story of Ben, her boyfriend who fled Uganda in search of a better life in the United States only to end up being imprisoned for 25 years.
Aciro (C) discussing her film at the Amakula film festival yesterday
As Aciro went about telling Ben’s story, along the way she realized that even though she was outside a prison, she was actually a prisoner like her man.
“His story intertwined with mine,” Aciro yesterday told audiences after her film screened at ongoing Amakula International Film Festival at the Uganda Museum.
After fleeing the war in northern Uganda to go and live in the US, Ben got sucked in the world of crime and is now serving three consecutive life sentences.
Aciro, who like Ben with whom they reconnected in 2009, hails from Gulu in Northern Uganda, was herself born in exile in Nairobi and grew up in the UK.
With lonely images of herself in seclusion and the solitary shots of Ben in a US penitentiary, Aciro blends the two stories into one.
“What joins Ben and I is true love,” says the 38-year-old who is still single because her childhood love is jailed in a foreign land.
Aciro opted for a documentary to in order to realistically express her anxiety, loss and alienation. She says a narrative film would have ‘lost the truth’ in trying to fictionalize events.
“Acting out the story wouldn’t give it justice,” adds Aciro, whose script was chosen by Maisha Film Lab in 2008 for production.
She was among the third group of Maisha alumni to attend both the screenwriters and technical labs.
Her first short film On Time also portrays the uprooting of people from their homes by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels led by Joseph Kony.
Although the war is over, Aciro, like Ben, can’t go back home. She also can’t traditionally claim her father’s land because she is a woman.
Docubox, an East African Documentary Film Fund, is now funding her short to be developed into a feature. Aciro is also the writer of The Coffee Shop series that’s currently showing on Urban TV.
“Series is an ongoing thing, it pays all the time and relies on easier stories unlike documentaries and movies,” she explains her decision to join the popular genre.
Aciro left a magazine she founded in Malawi, a sub editor job at African Woman magazine and co-editor position at the International Women Playwrights’ (IWP) Seasons magazine to do film because she wanted to see her stories come alive.
Going visual wasn’t easy, she notes, citing her first directing experience which was, in her own words, horrible.
“Writing screenplays which I wasn’t earning from, my mind blocking during the writing process discouraged me.”
However, when she started sharing her work and audiences appreciated them, Aciro was invigorated to pursue her filmmaking career.
“The Ugandan film industry has come a long way, we now tell our stories. With funding raised through networks, we will get there in five years,” she notes
She has authored four books including A War Song, written and produced two leading radio dramas in Uganda- Rock Point 256 and Mako Mere (making friends).
Aciro also worked as a production assistant on Queen of Katwe, a Disney production directed by Hollywood-based Indian-born director Mira Nair, also the founder of Maisha, an NGO that trains upcoming filmmakers in East Africa.
