If you walk into a video hall in Uganda your attention will probably go straight to a person sitting at the front of the audience. Speaking rapidly into a microphone, they comment loudly and continuously, often drowning out the sound of the film itself. You may well ask who this person is, and why they keep interfering with the film that people have come to watch.
I’ve been conducting research into Uganda’s film landscape for the last couple of years and I’ve been privileged to visit several different venues where movies are screened. Uganda has few cinemas – there are only three in the capital city, Kampala, with a total of ten screens. Instead, the country has an extensive network of video halls, known locally as bibandas.
Video halls are found throughout the country, particularly in outlying urban areas and entrance is relatively cheap; typically around 1,000 Ugandan shillings, or 21 British pence (a cinema ticket, meanwhile, usually costs around 20,000 shillings or a little over £4). Inside a video hall, benches or seats are laid out in front of televisions and films are screened throughout the day. These are often pirated works from the US, India, Nigeria, Korea, China and elsewhere. Some of the film industry players that I have met during my research estimate that there could be as many as 3,000 video halls in Uganda.
