La regina bambina

From the trailers one would guess that The Queen of Katwe is the typical formulaic and inspirational sports story, but it is much more. While segments of it are the same old story told and retold so beautifully, with a few unexpected twist and turns, is also a study of how success affects family ties and how character is king, even in the grim slums of Uganda. It offers a realistic and harshly honest, for a Disney film, look at Africa, with prostitution references and poor medical care reoccurring throughout the story. While the harsh environment might not make the viewer feel good, it makes the story all the more inspiring. The cinematography is excellent, with great shots of the children reacting to a world they had never seen before, be it an upper crust school, snow or the view from a airplane window. Great performances from the cast.

I highly recommend The Queen of Katwe.

Loved it well made and well acted. Teary in parts. It has been a while since a movie has had all the components of this movie. It captures how privileged we are in the west and out of pure will and following your passion you can come to be whom you really are against all odds.

The actors portrayed the story with great depth and conviction. I loved the end and hope all true story's have the chance to show (Those that are still living) their real persons as I felt it adds a realness to the story and movie final. Well directed as well.

There is a star in the making with actress Madina Nalwanga i am sure we will see allot more of her out standing performance.

I can see why this type of film would be hard to market. It may not be as complex to appeal to an adult audience and it may also not appeal to kids of young ages. I feel like it could have made a splash at the Academy Awards had it been handled better with its release. As it is, it's a good film and pretty much everything that I expected. Its screenplay is good, if predictable, and the performances really elevate the story and make all of its more formulaic emotional beats work as well. Oyelowo and Nyong'o really bring a lot of heart to the story in the background while Nalwanga is able to carry the film. Definitely recommended, although it's probably not for all types of audiences.

Mira Nair returns to Uganda once again, three decades after she made Mississipi Masala. This is a much better film. While Mississipi Masala centered around an upper middle class Indian-Ugandan family, Queen of Katwe is set in the slums of Uganda. Nair doesn't attempt to go easy on the slum visuals here. The filth and squalor are in your face here, from beginning to end. I haven't seen a film depicting poverty in this way for a long time. Even Slumdog Millionaire wasn't so strong. Otherwise Queen of Kawate is a fairly predictable story of an under-privileged girl rising to success against the odds. The medium of her rise is chess. She's the pawn who turns into a queen, as sometimes happens in chess. The performances are uniformly good, especially given that most of them are child actors (Mira Nair's first film was Salaam Bombay and she is pretty good at handling children). I found the end credits rather moving, where the real characters pose with the actors who played them on screen. All in all a very warm, watchable film.

This film tells the story of a teenage girl from a Ugandan ghetto. She is discovered by a chess teacher to be brilliant in chess, and hence she embark on a journey on international chess championships to lift her out of the ghetto.

"Queen of Katwe" tells a story that inspires people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Phiona and her family struggles to make ends meet, and yet she does something that is not conventionally economically active. The hardship of living in a ghetto is well depicted in the film, especially in the eviction scene and the car accident scene. The story is touching, especially when it tells how Phiona is under pressure. I notice how they depict Phiona under pressure during a chess game, and the opponents looking confident by staring fiercely into Phiona. This adds dimension to the story.