The film Call me Kuchu documents
activist David Kato's fight for gay rights in Uganda.
Kato, known as Uganda's first openly
gay man, was brutally murdered in his Kampala home on January 26,
2011. He fought to repeal Uganda's anti-gay laws and liberate his
fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, known as
“kuchus.”
Call Me Kuchu, by filmmakers
Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, depicts Kato's
last year as he and his fellow activists fought against passage of a
controversial bill that would increase the penalties for being gay in
a nation where it is already a crime, including punishable by death under certain
circumstances.
“The folks who are leading this
anti-gay push have been very clever about phrasing their arguments in
a way would basically instill fear in the general population,”
Zouhali-Worrall told CNN. “And the main way they've done that is
by talking about recruitment, which is this idea that gay people
can't reproduce so they have to recruit people and they usually
recruit little children. It creates this very scary idea of gay
people going into schools and trying to lure your children into their
lifestyle and ultimately raping them.”
Call me Kuchu premiered in
February at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award
for best documentary. It will have its World Pride gala screening
Thursday in London. (A trailer for the film is embedded in the right
panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)