OSCARS 2024: Bobi Wine: The People's President (2023)

Last year, the Best Documentary Feature Oscar went to a movie about Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader against a de-facto dictator in a foreign country. In the time since that award was given, Navalny has died in prison. It was a sad reminder that the documentary arts, as an actual force of change, are not as powerful as anyone in Hollywood would like to think. Now, another movie about a different opposition leader running for political office against a de-facto dictator in a different faraway country is nominated for an Oscar again. Bobi Wine, the subject of “Bobi Wine: The People's President,” has something else in common with Navalny too. Both began in other fields than politics, Alexei moving from internet comedian and Wine starting out as one of the biggest pop stars in Uganda.

Born Robert Kyagulanyi, Bobi Wine began to gain popularity as an AfroBeat performer in his native Uganda in the mid-2000s. As he grew more popular, Bobi Wine started to use his music to bring attention to social issues and humanitarian causes in Uganda. His wife, Barbi, was a big inspiration for that. Eventually, this interest led Kyagulanyi to pursue politics, being elected to Parliament. Wine has been an especially outspoken critic of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. Museveni has been in office since the eighties, often changing laws to extend his presidency. As Wine challenges Museveni more, eventually emerges as an opposing candidate for president, the pop-star turned politician has his life, and the lives of his friends and family, directly threatened. 

I'll get the obvious out of the way first. I'm an ignorant American. I don't hear nearly enough about what's going on in other parts of the world, simply because our news organizations, papers, and journals in this country don't talk about them. Uganda is far away from the United States and the state of affairs over there rarely makes the news over here. I suspect that's true of a lot of people watching “The People's President,” which makes this documentary important for that reason alone. The film is going to inform a whole new audience about what is happening to the Ugandan people. 

And what is happening in Uganda doesn't seem great. “The People's President” is one of those docs that puts the audience right into the action with its subjects. As Wine's campaign picks up more steam, Museveni's regime clearly begins to feel threaten. Wine is brutally beaten and unlawfully imprisoned. Eventually, he's released and goes back on the trail. His family is harassed by soldiers, forcing him to send his kids to the U.S. for their own safety. It escalates into violence quickly. We see friends and members of Wine's campaign shot or beaten, bleeding out through their noses as they struggle to breathe. In one of the film's most bracing moments, Wine is pulled out of his vehicle literally in the middle of an interview. At one point, we see first person footage of someone being shot at, the sound of the bullets whizzing by. 

Through it all, Bobi Wine remains steadfast in his ideas and goals. He admits that he used to admire Museveni, who was a revolutionary once fighting for the rights of the people. The question inevitably hangs in the air: If Wine gets elected, what would stop him from similarly becoming corrupted and turning into an authoritarian too? The man himself raises this question and assures people that his goal is to make sure the people of Uganda have the power to control what happens in their own country. That, in such a situation, he would be willing to step down. One hopes so. Wine seems genuine. The more intimate scenes, of him interacting at home with his wife and kids, are very sweet. His commitment to his political ideas, of wanting to return power to the citizens of Uganda, seems sincere. I suppose anyone willing to get beaten for what he believes in, get back up and keep at it afterwards, is serious. 

As of this writing, Wine is not imprisoned, despite loosing the more-or-less rigged election against Museveni in 2021. Hopefully, he won't end up in the same situation as Alexei Navalvy. “The People's President” is a well assembled doc, using raw footage to put the viewer right into the middle of the chaos and make us all too aware of what is at stake here. It says a lot about how effective I found the movie, in spite of one big factor: I don't actually like Wine's music very much. A song he performs, to encourage safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the corninest fucking things I've heard recently. All of that aside, the movie about him is pretty good and I sincerely hope that his journey to bring wider freedom to Uganda is successful. [7/10]