When we first meet Bobi Wine, a popular Afrobeats musician turned Ugandan presidential opposition candidate, he beams with the sunny buoyancy that comes from being celebrated and adored. By the close of this urgent, electric documentary, Bobi is a changed man: sober, serious, not broken exactly, but certainly bruised by the experience of squaring up against the ruthlessly authoritarian incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni. In power since 1986, Museveni is not about to voluntarily step down.
To this end, in 2018 the then 73-year-old Museveni rewrites a clause in the Ugandan constitution that had hitherto barred people above 75 from running for the highest office, allowing him to stand for election yet again. In response, and with the support of his wife, Barbie, Wine steps up his opposition, graduating from cheery, toe-tapping protest songs to an official political campaign. The response from the Museveni regime is swift and brutal: Wine is arrested and severely beaten in custody. But this only serves to strengthen his resolve.
Thematically, there are parallels with Navalny, the Oscar-winning portrait of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. But while that film unfolded like a controlled, meticulously paced thriller, Bobi Wine: The People’s President places the camera on the precarious frontline of a political battle that could prove to be fatal. It’s a gripping piece of film-making: a propulsive, kinetic account of a grassroots campaign captured at what would seem to be considerable personal risk to both the subject and directors. And as a snapshot of a curdled, corrupted political system, it is eye-opening and at times genuinely terrifying.
