From Fox Searchlight Pictures:
"The Last King of Scotland" based on the Giles Foden novel and starring Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin is now filming in Uganda. Learn more about the devastating effects of Uganda’s civil war on a lost generation.
Last King of Scotland
Posted at 3:18 PM (PDT) on Tuesday, July 12, 2005
From Channel 4 News at UgandanNetwork.com:
A British movie about Idi Amin
Bang! Bang! Bang! No not war in some urban side street in the Ugandan capital - but a scene from the Last King of Scotland, a British movie about Idi Amin, directed by Kevin Macdonald, of Touching the Void fame.
Idi Amin may be dead, but he's still an internal subject of discussion - they know he was a brute. You meet so many people who lost relatives to his tyranny. But many people also believed he gave Uganda a voice.
Either way the very fact that more than 50 westerners can pitch up here for 3 months and sit about in directors chairs with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of cameras lights and effects is a signal not only of the safety and tranquillity of Kampala but also that the country has come to terms with its past - even to the extent to having a movie made about the old ogre.
In the scene I saw, the uncannily Amin-like Forest Whitaker trundles down the hill in a presidential merc into an infernal assassination attempt - hence the bangs. But this is what our programme is about tonight - not the movie, but that it is possible for a country to come from tyranny to significant economic growth.
