Strategic Homage: The Boda Boda Thieves, Film Festival Funds, and the Representation of Contemporary Uganda

The Boda Boda Thieves (Mugisha and Tayler 2015) was among the first feature-length films produced in Uganda. It is also an homage to De Sica’s neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), the setting changed from Rome to Kampala and the titular bicycle to a boda boda motorcycle taxi. This paper argues that the ‘unfaithfulness’ of the homage holds strategic value for The Boda Boda Thieve s by positioning the film within a recognised and prestigious international film lineage while also, and unlike the remake, granting it leeway to tell a specifically Ugandan story. This fusion of the recognisable with the novel is central to the film’s simultaneous appeal to both the international film funds that financed it and to local audiences in Uganda. Placing the two texts next to each other further reveals how The Boda Boda Thieves parses Uganda’s socio-economic evolution and the precarity that it has occasioned.