Hollywood comes to Africa
2005-06-07 13:54
Kampala - Uganda is set to relive the era of its most brutal dictator, Idi Amin, as a major Hollywood production company begins filming the screen adaptation of the acclaimed novel The Last King of Scotland this week.
Starring award-winning United States actors Forest Whitaker as the notorious Amin, Kerry Washington as one of his wives and television star Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, the film tells the tale of Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish physician who becomes the dictator's personal doctor.
"It has been a long-held ambition of mine to work in Africa, so I am very pleased that making The Last King of Scotland in Uganda has given me the reason to come," Whitaker said on Monday.
Cameras start rolling soon
Beginning on Saturday, when cameras begin to roll outside the Ugandan parliament, the capital, the Lake Victoria airport town of Entebbe and other parts of the country will be thrown back to the height of Amin's ruthless regime in the 1970s.
Filming will also take place in Mabira forest in central Uganda, where many of the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Amins excesses were dumped during his eight-year reign of terror, one of the producers, Charles Steel said.
Between 300 000 and 500 000 Ugandans were killed during Amin's despotic 1971 to 1979 rule, the height of which is covered by The Last King of Scotland.
On-location shooting in Uganda is to last eight weeks and the film is expected to be released worldwide by Twentieth Century Fox International in July 2006, according to the production company, Cowboy Films.
About 300 Ugandans, including about 100 actors and extras, are to be employed by Cowboy Films during the $6m shoot, it said.
More about the characters
Based on Giles Foden's award-winning novel of the same name, The Last King of Scotland tells the story of Garrigan, played by Scottish actor James McAvoy, and his career as Amin's doctor.
Flattered at first by his command appointment, the physician is horrified to discover his unknowing complicity in the savage crimes of Amin, who in real life died in exile in Saudi Arabia in August 2003 of multiple organ failure.
Anderson plays an Israeli nurse whom Garrigan falls in love with shortly after his arrival in Uganda and plays a critical role later during the well-known 1976 raid on a hijacked Air France flight at Entebbe airport.
The Last King of Scotland, titled after Amin's pyschopathic belief that he should take over from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as monarch to the Scots, is directed by Kevin Macdonald, who won an Oscar for the 2000 documentary One Day in September about the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Ugandan actors Abby Mukiibi, Stephen Rwangyezi and Sam Okello play significant roles in the film: Mukiibi as Amin's right hand man, Rwangyezi as a senior government minister and Okello as a rural clinic worker.