New York filmmaker Kimi Takesue and Rotterdam programmer Gertjan Zuilhof are going places in and around Kampala, Uganda. Like the Entebbe Zoo.
All filmmakers work differently. This is how Kimi Takesue works. She inquirers where to go and who or what to see there. When arrived at a market, a club, a church or the zoo, she starts by unfolding her tripod and mounting her quite big camera. She has a small one but does not use it much. She puts it up - very often quite low to the ground - in front of her object and just starts filming.
A school class in the Entebbe Zoo.
At first people are just wondering, but quite soon they get curious. What is there to see in the view why they are being filmed and what happens to their image in the camera.
Children, small and big, on an outing to the Entebbe Zoo.
Quite soon they are no longer shy and come over and watch.
The view finder they all wanted to see.
I have quite a few pictures of a mountain of children and an invisible filmmaker inside. Kimi always comes out of it. She keeps on smiling and talking and after a while the children have seen enough or they start answering Kimi's questions. Questions like: do you know who Obama is?
She came out again.
With adults it can be a different thing. Markets are wild places here and reactions are sometimes aggressive. But Kimi just keeps on smiling and talking and most people give in and if not she just moves her tripod a little bit further and starts talking to somebody else. Like to the shoe shiners on top of a roof near the old taxi station, the wildest place in town. A deluge of second hand shoes given by Western charity organization ruined the local profession of shoe making. Nothing can compete with free shoes. Charity is bad for the economy you have to conclude. Now the former shoe makers shine the second hand shoes to make them look like new. They buy the shoes in front of the building out of piles of charity shoes. They shine them like new on the roof and sell them to stalls at the back of the building. So a bit of economy after all.
Kimi and the shoe shining men on a roof at the old taxi market in Kampala.
Apart from children and shoe shiners we also meet filmmakers. Filmmakers of all kinds. Quite special was the meeting with VJ Ivan who runs a boxing school and a video hall. In the hall (made out of old wood and cardboard and set up in the middle of a slum) he presents Nigerian melodrama's and old Hong Kong action movies with something that is more than a translation. He makes an extra elaborate soundtrack on top of the original soundtrack (that is more or less erased) and tells all kinds of extra's to entertain his audience. He is also making films with the kids from his boxing school and while we were filming him he let his camera man film us.
Kimi Takesue interviews VJ Ivan in front of his Video Hal in Kampala slum.
There are not that many young filmmakers here in Uganda that have the ambition to make work that can be shown in international film festivals. All our contacts mentioned all the time just two. Donald Mugisha who teached himself filmmaking by making music video's with friends and Caroline Kamya who studied in England and runs a professional production office called iVad.
Filmmaker Donald Mugisha in front of Pap Cafe in Kampala. 
Kimi Takesue and filmmaker and producer Caroline Kamya on the roof of her Kampala office. 
Kampala shore of Lake Victoria.
In the picture you see the shore of Lake Victoria. A lake as big as a sea. The man is dusty from carrying bags in boats. That's why his trousers are wet. In the hut a group of men play board games. African game on a colorful board. We saw it in markets all the time. The bird is a Maribou Stork. A scavenger bird. Here he looks for dead fish. You see them also in the city. A filmmaker told us they came into the city during the war to eat all the dead bodies and after the war they stayed.