KAMPALA: Geresom A. G. Musamali had never been to a cinema before he was chosen to join an unprecedented screenwriting course at a house on a hill overlooking the Ugandan edge of Lake Victoria.

Set up by Indian director Mira Nair, Maisha Film Lab aims to give east Africa’s faltering film industry a boost by unearthing local talent and training budding screenwriters for success.

“I strive to reach the top having come from nothing in the film world,” said 45-year-old Musamali after completing the first Maisha sessions.

Course organizers say local artists like Musamali have the ability to get their stories made, but no knowledge of the film world. They want to change that.

Although Musamali had never seen a big screen production, selectors said his funny and original script grabbed their attention immediately.

Musamali’s comedy — ‘The Fleas of Ggwangalyange’ — takes place in the chaotic world of a business school graduate who ends up as motorbike taxi driver in an African city not unlike Uganda’s capital Kampala.

“It’s an extraordinarily funny and wonderful screenplay,” said Nair. “It makes you laugh from the first page.”

The Indian director was overwhelmed to receive 147 applications for the course, including 57 scripts from Ugandans.

The ten successful applicants — three from Kenya, two each from Uganda, Tanzania and India, and one from Pakistan — spent 10 days dissecting their screenplays with mentors.

They included Nair, US director Matthew Robbins and Sabrina Dhawan, writer of Monsoon Weddings, Nair’s film which won the top prize at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.

By day, the experts gave advice, analysis and personal coaching. At night, the aspiring screenwriters wrote and rewrote their scripts.

More films are being made these days in east Africa, which has long been a movie backwater.

They include the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda about the 1994 genocide, and The Last King of Scotland, a big budget story about the life of Uganda’s late dictator Idi Amin.

But few films are produced by east Africans.

Movies from Nigeria’s booming ‘Nollywood’ film industry dominate video halls in Kampala. ‘Nollywood’ was inspired by the success of India’s prolific ‘Bollywood’ studios.

Nair says she wants to give east Africans their chance.

“Within five years, this is our dream, to create a local culture of films made by east Africans, for east Africans and for the world,” she says. “We are creating a very exciting synergy between east Africa and south Asia.”

Joanitta Bewulira-Wandera, 44, was one of the participants living together in a house in the hills south of Kampala.

Lead mentor for her script was Vishal Bhardwaj, the Indian director of Maqbool, an award-winning Hindi take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Bewulira-Wandera said the director made her see her film Jordana’s Inheritance— a brutal story about domestic violence and wife-sharing in some traditional African societies — could move a much greater audience than she first thought.

“He tore into my script, but in the end he did it so beautifully. It all just fell into place,” she said before letting out a high-pitched, ululating wail of happiness.

Maisha means ‘zest for life’ in east Africa’s Kiswahili language. Next year, Nair will add a 12-day directors’ course to the second screenwriting lab, covering filmmaking, marketing and distribution.

All travel and expenses are paid by Maisha, which Nair says is a non-profit, non-commercial organization.

She has received donations from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Criterion Collection, and the whole of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola’s personal screen library.

Nair is married to Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani and spends three months every year in Kampala.

Like him, she is also a professor at New York’s Columbia University, where she teaches film students paying up to $50,000 a year in tuition and living costs.

“We’re doing almost the exact thing here, with the same teachers, for free, but in a very intense, shorter time,” she said. “All the connections and networks remain.”

She hopes big name backers like the directors Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola and Raoul Peck can help find further support, including film deals, for east Africans like Musamali.

“I am the guinea pig for Maisha,” Musamali said with a wide grin. He is reapplying for next year’s directors’ course.

“I had never been to a cinema hall before, so if I can be picked from zero and made a success, we will have told the whole world there is a talent here that has lain idle.”—Reuters