Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2016, we are headed to Uganda to kick some ass…
Movie: Bad Black
Year: 2016
Director: Nabwana IGG
Country: Uganda
The Elevator Pitch: A doctor is trained by a local child to get back an heirloom from a Ugandan gang.
How Was the Movie?:
I’m not sure how anyone is supposed to review this film but I will say we absolutely loved it. Probably it is best if you watch Bad Black with about 20 people who all want to scream through the entire movie. I’ve never seen a Ugandan film before and if you wanted to talk about things like narrative cohesion or audio quality or character building you’re really going to be completely out of luck.
Bad Black, like almost all Wakaliwood films has running narration done by a VJ who repeats dialogue, fills in the blanks, does MST3K-style commentary, makes his own jokes, and also sometimes seems to be interrupted by people in the recording booth but doesn’t stop the recording. This is simply part of the film. Even with such a man trying to explain the film to us I found myself a little lost most of the time because scenes simply stop and start whenever the filming got bad or boring or if an actor got hurt or fell into dirty water (this happens more than you’d think).
The film itself is a testament to the fact that humans just want to make stories and play. My husband thought it was less like a movie and more like a home movie (you can see a dissertation level on that topic in Dan Olson’s “I Don’t Know James Rolfe” video essay). Aside from that this was energetic, smart, and earnest look at a region and population not from a ethnographers angle but from the people who have lived that life themselves simply making stories they want to watch. We see the neighborhoods, the types of lives available to the people, and of course their interaction with outsiders/white people.
I don’t even know how I would begin to summarize this film, I suspect watching it even 3 or 4 times a coherent story line might never really form but I’ve thought about this film so many times since we saw it because I’m deeply interested in its creation and its path to getting to the wider world. There’s a Reddit thread from the white guy who basically stars in and financed the film. Despite the lo-fi quality the film has special effects and is clearly shot on a decent hand cam or phone and that the thing that actually costs money is audio and especially distribution – filming and finding people who want to act is the easy part.
After all that I can 110% recommend this film to anyone who has an open mind because it is a FUN film. There’s pretty much constant action scenes, pretty funny jokes, the voice over is occasionally a total id moment, and it’s even a woman-centered narrative at points! The narrative is very loose but if you’ve ever watched a poorly cut together micro budget B movie, this won’t even phase you. If you’re a very certain type of person this will turn your idea of movies inside out.
10/10 SUPAH UGANDA!
What was for Dinner?:
For dinner to go with the scrappy vibes of the movie I decided to make a Ugandan street food favorite, Rolex. Rolex is short for “rolled eggs” which checks out because it is a thin egg omelette inside a chapati stuffed with meat, cheese, vegetables, etc. It took me a couple minutes to figure out that what I think a chapati is: namely an Indian thin flatbread made with atta, whole wheat flour, is not what Ugandan’s think a chapati is. In Uganda a chapati is a thin flatbread made with maida, white flour. Either way you probably noticed I am not great at making omelettes so mine all broke when I removed them from the pan but this was obviously very good. In the future I would probably also put some ketchup or salsa or even avjar in there also because I found it just a little too dry.
I made a few of these and they were really good, this could be a nice way to use up leftover bits and pieces even if I’m not great at making omelettes and that’s a big component in this roll it’s probably worth making a few times more. I can see why these are really popular as a street food though and it’s kind of genius to put a thin layer of cooked egg in a wrap. 8/10, pretty delicious.
That’s it for 2016, see you in the future year of 2017!