Call Me Kuchu

Hot Docs, Toronto – TICKET GIVEAWAY!

callmekuchu — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Co-presented by

CALL ME KUCHU will have its North American premiere next week at Hot Docs, in Toronto, Canada!

For those of you in Toronto, or with friends and family there, we have THREE PAIRS OF TICKETS to give away – one for each of the film’s screenings next week. (Screening dates and times below.)

We’ll be pulling names out of a hat on Tuesday morning so if you want in, just send us an email to callmekuchu@gmail.com with the subject line: “I want to come to the North American premiere!” plus your name and telephone number, as well as the date(s) you’d like to attend.

We’ll let the three winners know their fate by noon on Tuesday.

Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival
North American Premiere
Toronto, Canada
WED, MAY 2nd, 9.45pm – Isabel Bader Theatre [Buy tickets]
THURS, MAY 3rd, 7pm – TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 [Buy tickets]
SAT, MAY 5th, 9pm – Isabel Bader Theatre [Buy tickets]

Filed under: About the film

Next stop: Toronto

callmekuchu — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:29:22 +0000

It’s been a busy few months, so we think it’s about time for a CALL ME KUCHU update. As many of you already know, the film had its world premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival, where it picked up two awards! You can read more about it all here. None of this would have been possible without the generosity of our funders, including the 169 folks who chipped in for our Kickstarter campaign to raise $11,000 – so a BIG thank you again and rest assured that your rewards are on their way.

Since then we’ve been working hard to get the film out into the world. We now have a bunch of festivals lined up for the coming months, including the Canadian international documentary film festival Hot Docs, where CALL ME KUCHU will have its North American premiere next week! (Hot Docs screenings times and tickets can be found here). Which leads us to our first ticket giveaway. We’ll be drawing names on Tuesday, so if you’re not in Toronto yourself, spread the word to your Canadian friends!

As for our US and UK premieres – both will take place in June, and we’ll be joined by at least one of the kuchu activists we follow in the film. We can’t quite share the specifics yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we can. One exciting announcement we can share with you: a couple of days before Pride festivities get underway, CALL ME KUCHU will be screening at the legendary Castro Theater in San Francisco as a centerpiece screening at the Frameline Film Festival!

But festivals aren’t the only things keeping us busy. We’ve also been working hard to develop an advocacy strategy that will allow CALL ME KUCHU to be used for high-level lobbying and crucial grassroots work to change the situation for kuchus in Uganda and elsewhere. In April, we were honored to receive a Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund grant to put towards our outreach campaign. We are also one of ten films that will be discussing potential collaborations with political and religious leaders as well as non-governmental organizations at The Good Pitch Europe, a pitch forum held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London this June. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

In the meantime, you can get regular updates on CALL ME KUCHU and the issues it explores on Facebook and Twitter, and at our website: www.callmekuchu.com. Details about upcoming screenings and events can be found here. And we’re always keen to hear your thoughts, comments or questions, so let us know what you’re thinking about at callmekuchu@gmail.com.

Thanks, as always, for your support.
As David would say, A Luta Continua!

Malika & Katy
Directors, Call Me Kuchu

Filed under: About the film

Update! The CALL ME KUCHU World Premiere at Berlin International Film Festival!!

callmekuchu — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:28:06 +0000

Katherine, Naome, and Malika after the World Premiere
of Call Me Kuchu

Just over one month ago we were told that CALL ME KUCHU had been invited to have its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. To be honest, it came as a bit of a shock to us both, and when we first read the email we weren’t positive that we could finish the film in time. But for some reason we decided to give it a go…

Over the course of a grueling and sleepless three weeks, we finished the edit (with the support of consulting editor extraordinaire Yana Gorskaya), took the film through color correction and a sound mix, and gave it a once-over with our legal counsel to make sure we were in good shape to screen the film to the public (as luck would have it, we were). We also spent a nerve-wracking week wrangling travel permission and transport for Naome Ruzindana, one of the LGBT activists featured in the film, so that she could join us in Berlin.

Finally, on the evening of Saturday February 11th, with Naome by our side, we presented CALL ME KUCHU for its world premiere at the Berlinale. The result? Many hundreds of bums in seats and lots of engaged voices, three screenings in a row.

It cost a fair amount of money as well as effort to reach this crucial point, and none of that would have been possible without the phenomenal support provided by our superstar funders Chicken & Egg Pictures and the Catapult Film Fund, as well as our generous Kickstarter donors. Today our Kickstarter campaign closed with a heartening $11,044, or 110% of our goal, so we’ve got to say great big THANK YOU to everyone who donated and helped us spread the word!

And there’s more good news: CALL ME KUCHU scooped up two awards at the Berlinale — the Teddy Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Fairbindet Award, which includes a German theatrical release for the film later this year! CALL ME KUCHU also came second place in the Panorama Audience Award (close behind the striking doc MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT) and received an honorable mention for the Siegessäule Readers Choice Award.

We are thrilled that David’s story is receiving the attention it deserves, especially at this crucial juncture when Kampala’s kuchus need the world’s attention more than ever. Just two weeks ago the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was reintroduced in Uganda’s Parliament, and last week a government minister shut down an LGBT conference in Kampala, claiming that the activists were intent on recruiting Ugandans into homosexuality. It’s clear that the situation still requires action, and we’re hoping that CALL ME KUCHU will spur further efforts to support the LGBT activists working on the ground to end state-sanctioned homophobia in Uganda.

We’ll keep you posted on our outreach and advocacy plans for CALL ME KUCHU, as well as future screenings, and please do get in touch: callmekuchu@gmail.com with any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you!

Malika & Katy

Filed under: About the film

What follows a successful Kickstarter campaign? Rewards rewards rewards!

callmekuchu — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 23:36:23 +0000

Thanks to the generous folk that frequent Kickstarter, our fundraising campaign closed last month with nearly 120% of our goal. The response was amazing: we got some good press, including a Q&A on the Kickstarter blog, and we raised nearly $12,000, essential funds to allow us to edit the film. But most importantly, those backers have helped us prove that there’s already a passionate and engaged audience for Call Me Kuchu. That came in particularly useful last month, when we took part in an intense few days of pitching our film to broadcasters and producers as one of nine projects (and only two docs) at the L.A. Film Festival’s “Fast Track” financing market. Having the Kickstarter campaign to hold up as proof of general public interest in Call Me Kuchu was invaluable, and more than fifty meetings later (!) we’re feeling excited about the film’s future. (Although our throats are still a little sore!)

But now it’s time to say a proper THANK YOU and dispatch our rewards to our beloved backers… just as soon as Malika untangles all those recycled paper bead necklaces from Uganda, we’ll be good to go!

As always, let us know if you have any thoughts or questions about the film, or just want to chat: callmekuchu@gmail.com. And don’t forget to follow our progress and receive updates on the situation in Uganda via Facebook and Twitter.

Filed under: About the film

Thank you! & the final push

callmekuchu — Mon, 16 May 2011 05:23:48 +0000

Wow! We are thrilled and honored by the response so far to the Call Me Kuchu Kickstarter fundraising campaign. After five weeks, the campaign has 1000+ “likes” on Facebook, more than 230 backers and we’ve surpassed our $10,000 goal! BIG THANKYOUS to everyone who has donated and/or helped spread the word about the film.

Of course, we’re going to need a lot more than $10,000 to finish Call Me Kuchu, and we still have a few days to go on Kickstarter, so we’d appreciate anything you can do to help us with one last push to get the word out about the campaign via email, Twitter, Facebook… or your mouth! And if you haven’t yet made a donation and you’re considering it, please do! Everything we raise beyond our $10,000 goal will be invested in one of the many other crucial post-production costs we’re going to face in the coming months, such as hiring a composer or a sound editor. Oh, and we still have some great rewards to give away!

As always, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at callmekuchu@gmail.com. And don’t forget to follow our progress on Facebook and Twitter!

Filed under: About the film

A Production Update

callmekuchu — Mon, 16 May 2011 05:21:44 +0000

Life’s been busy for the Call Me Kuchu team. We spent the last month and a half prepping for the edit in L.A. whilst fellows in an awesome seven-week documentary lab run by the folks at Film Independent. But unquestionably the biggest highlight in April came when we bumped into Elmo and his handler at Full Frame Doc Fest (photographic proof below).

We’re now back in NYC to start post-production — and we’re raring to go. Watching Call Me Kuchu‘s community of supporters grow through Kickstarter has really proved that there is an audience for this film and made us even more determined to complete what is a very important project to us both.

Filed under: About the film

callmekuchu — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:36:37 +0000

Filed under: Featured