American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate, Disney has unveiled the first image from The Queen of Katwe, the biographical drama about Ugandan chess prodigy, Phiona Mutesi, starring Lupita Nyong’o, David Oyelowo, and newcomer Madina Nalwanga.
The film is based on Mutesi’s story which was the inspiration for a book by Tim Crothers, similarly titled, The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster.
Lupita Nyongo in the film Photo Credits: (Disney Enterprises Inc.)
Mutesi is chess player who rose from the slums of Katwe to become the first Ugandan and the first East African lady to attain a Women Candidate Master together with her country-mate Ivy Amoko.
Directed by Mira Nair, the film stars Nalwanga as her, a young girl from the slums of Kampala who chases her dream of becoming an international chess champion. Nyong’o plays Phiona’s mother, and Oyelowo plays a missionary who teaches chess to local kids.
The Queen of Katwe is scheduled to open in the fall and promises a number scenes in Uganda, an inspiration for Academy Award- winning actress, Lupita: “This is a story about the commitment to a dream even in the most discouraging of situations.
“The slum of Katwe is a very difficult place to live, but you see these people living there with dignity and making it day by day. And so to go there and to have that environment to work from really did sober us and enliven us,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
Mutesi grew up in the Ugandan slum of Katwe, where as of 2011 fifty percent of teen girls were mothers; when Mutesi was about three her father died of AIDS and shortly afterwards her older sister Juliet died of an unknown cause.
When Mutesi was about nine, and had already dropped out of school as her family could not afford to send her, she found a chess program run by the Sports Outreach Institute, which taught her how to play chess.
In 2010 she played six rounds on Board 2 and one round on Board 1 for Uganda at the 39th World Chess Olympiad scoring 1.5 points from the seven, and as of 2011 she was a three-time Women’s Junior Champion of Uganda.
