American-born Ugandan actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine is starring in the new Showtime/Paramount+ series Dexter: Resurrection in the role of Blessing Kamara. But he’s blessing audiences with more than just his acting work. The multi-hyphenate — actor, writer, filmmaker, playwright – also has an exceptional documentary on the festival circuit, Memories of Love Returned.
On the new episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, Mwine explains the film came about purely by chance. He was driving in rural Uganda in the early 2000s when his vehicle broke down. As the car was being repaired in the small town of Mbirizi, he looked around and discovered a small photography studio operated by Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo, “the sole photographer for hundreds of miles” around, Mwine recalls. The film, winner of awards at festivals across the world, documents Mwine’s effort to make the first public exhibition of the photographer’s work.
Ssalongo made portraits of people from all walks of life, photographing them at home, at weddings or other occasions in ways vastly different from the ethnographic image-making that makes an object of study out of many Africans. Here, people are rendered with an intimacy and simplicity – straight couples, apparently gay couples, old and young.
Mwine says it was the earnings he received from co-starring on The Chi that allowed him to fulfill his mission to make Ssalongo’s work more widely known. He also tells us how support from executive producer Steven Soderbergh helped bring the project to life. And he explains how delving into Ssalongo’s complicated personal life risked turning the documentary into The Real Housewives of Mbirizi.
Doc Talk co-hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey call Memories of Love Returned one of the best documentaries of the year.
Before getting into the interview with Mwine, we start this week’s episode with a discussion of the Emmy nominations, which brought recognition to celebrity-themed documentaries like Will & Harper, Pee-wee as Himself and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, a genre of nonfiction film that, by contrast, hasn’t earned a lot of favor with voters from the Motion Picture Academy’s documentary branch.
That’s on the new edition of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.