Inside Uganda’s video halls, ‘video jokers’ transform Hollywood blockbusters into local entertainment

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.

Video hall owners have always had a problem, though. Despite Uganda’s history as a British colony, English is not spoken fluently by everyone. Neither are Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese or Korean. In the 1980s, the “video joker” (VJ) emerged as a solution and soon became a key feature of the video hall.

The VJ sits at the front of the audience with a microphone and a sound mixer. Talking over the film, they explain its plot and paraphrase the dialogue in the Ugandan language appropriate to the location in which they are working (in Kampala this would generally be Luganda).

Importantly, the VJ’s version of what characters are saying and what is happening in the film may diverge significantly from the original version. They are known to give characters and locations Ugandan names, for example, and most interject hyperbole, jokes and social or moral commentary into their performances.

One of my interviewees told me of a VJ he had seen performing over Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer, who frequently claimed: “This bomb is big enough to destroy the whole of Africa!” He was amping up the jeopardy (unnecessarily, perhaps) and bringing the film home by using a local frame of reference. The VJ, in other words, can only very loosely be considered a translator. Many of my interviewees likened them more to an MC or a sports commentator – someone who “spices” up a film by adding their own performance to it and keeping the audience “hyped”.

Many VJs are celebrities in Uganda and possess loyal fans who regularly turn out to watch them perform. In fact, the VJ is often more of a draw for audiences than the film they are voicing over. Celebrity VJs have sought to capitalise on their success by selling pirated films on DVD or via streaming platforms with their voice-over tracks baked in, so that their fans can enjoy their work at home.

Even Ugandan televisions stations have experimented with broadcasting foreign content overlaid with VJ tracks. Furthermore, the Kampala-based micro-studio known as Wakaliwood (after Wakaliga, the village where it is based) has raised the profile of the video joker outside of east Africa. It has released two films — Who Killed Captain Alex and Bad Black — on YouTube with an absurdly comic, English-language voice over performed by one of my interviewees, VJ Emmie. Wakaliwood have garnered a global cult following and their work has been screened at festivals and midnight-movie events around the world (sometimes with Emmie performing live).

VJ controversies

Back in Uganda, VJs remain very popular but they’re not without controversy. Their work raises significant issues around intellectual property protection since it relies on the pirating of films. The fact that VJs’ and video halls’ contravention of IP law often goes unpunished in Uganda has been a major stumbling block on the country’s path toward developing a sustainable domestic film production industry.

It’s hard for Ugandan producers to compete with VJs who get their films for free and face few overheads when selling their DVDs to the public. Many Ugandan filmmakers also take issue with the tradition of video joking on aesthetic grounds, arguing that it ruins the integrity of a film and trivialises the audience experience.

The debates around video joking in Uganda won’t be settled soon but the tradition helps us to appreciate two important facts about the exhibition of films. First, what is considered a “normal” way to watch a film varies enormously around the world and is connected to a location’s specific social, cultural and economic context. The way of watching films which is most common in mainstream cinemas in Europe or North America for example, where viewers sit silently in the dark, is only one way of “doing cinema”.

Second, when it comes to our experience of a film, the film itself is only the starting point. Anyone who has ever dressed up and attended a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room will know this too. What those films mean to us has as much to do with the interpersonal experience of watching them as the movie itself. This is perhaps even true when we hold film nights at home, joking with friends as we watch.

So although the VJ is a Ugandan tradition, it has things to tells the rest of the world about the universal experience of watching films.

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