|
Phil Culbertson, '06, has been in Africa on and off since his graduation from Whitworth. He spends most of his time there helping young people through his work with USAID Africa, the Heifer Project, and Come Let's Dance, a nonprofit grass-roots organization dedicated to empowering and inspiring the youth of Africa to initiate change in their communities. (See www.comeletsdance.org for more information.) Though working with kids is his chief priority, he made time in his already-packed schedule to shoot a short film about Wilson Bugembe, a former "street kid" who is now the most popular musician in Uganda. The film won Culbertson and his fellow filmmakers a major award, "Best African Short Subject," from the African Film Academy Awards. Though Culbertson and his director were invited to the awards ceremony, which took place last summer, "I was so deep in the bush when the announcement came that I didn't hear in time," Culbertson says. "I couldn't have afforded to go anyway."
Culbertson and three of his African friends decided to make the film about Bugembe, who lived on the streets of Kampala just six years ago after losing his entire family to the AIDS epidemic, when the young man rose to stardom with his first album, Yellow.
Because of regular power outages and other technological challenges in Uganda, Culbertson found the film-making difficult but worthwhile. "I was trying to meet a deadline to finish the editing," he says, "so we walked through a monsoon to retrieve a generator from our church, rented a truck from some random guy on the side of the road, took the generator to our place, and ran it all night so that I could finish." The film was submitted to the Kampala Film Festival and then to the Zanzibar Film Festival. Eventually, the African Film Festival picked it up and nominated it for the African Academy Award. The film was shown in London in October.
|
Whitworth Alum's Film Wins "African Oscar"