In late February, Ugandan-American actor and filmmaker Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine brought his documentary "Memories of Love Returned" to Mbirizi, a town 165 kilometers (103 mi) by road, south-west of Kampala, Uganda's capital city. The screenings ran two evenings, February 27 and 28, in a dusty parking lot opposite the police station. Plastic chairs. No backdrop. No surround sound. The screen was mounted on a Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) truck. Admission was free. Over a thousand people attended across both nights, by Mwine's count.
Ugandan critic Kalungi Kabuye attended the Mbirizi screening and reviewed it for New Vision. "Every village I know in Uganda has, or had, a village photographer," he wrote. Phone and digital cameras have made the figure obsolete. Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo — the late photographer whose five-decade archive is the subject of Mwine's film — was one of the last.
A week later, "Memories of Love Returned" opened at Century Cinemax Kisementi in Kampala's Acacia Mall. The March 6 premiere was a red-carpet event sponsored by Uganda Waragi, with the Queen of Buganda in attendance. Mwine says the film was the top seller at the box office over the opening weekend. The cinema scheduled a return screening for Saturday, March 14. It was the top seller that weekend, too.
From the Mbirizi Premiere, February 2026
The heart-warming documentary, a two-decade project about Mwine's chance encounter with Kibaate after his car broke down in Mbirizi in 2002, premiered at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival in October 2024 and won Best Documentary Feature. It played Film Africa in London the same month, then AFRIFF in Lagos later that year, where it won a Special Jury Prize. In early 2025, it screened at the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles and as a Slamdance spotlight feature. Zanzibar International Film Festival, the Africa Foto Fair in Abidjan, and the NBO Film Festival in Nairobi followed through the rest of that year. Last Friday, it screened at LACMA — Mwine's third Los Angeles screening, in the city where he lives. The New York African Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center comes next, then the University of Pittsburgh.
Invitations continue to come in from festivals in Morocco, Switzerland, Ghana, and Senegal. A Tanzania screening is pending, as are potential stops in Ethiopia and Rwanda.
The tour is primarily Mwine's effort and self-funded. A working actor, he used income earned from roles in U.S. television series, including "Dexter: Resurrection" on Paramount+, "The Chi" on Showtime, and the upcoming Apple TV+ series "Smoke," to finance "Memories of Love Returned," cover the Mbirizi premiere, and rent the screen for the film's run at Century Cinemax.
The process has been instructive, informing his working logic: "At some point, you stop expecting support that may or may not arrive," he said. "That realization forces a different mindset: identify the next step, take it, and keep going."
Mwine hasn't decided where the current tour ends. Streaming remains on the table but is not necessarily the goal. For now, the theatrical journey is what's immediately in front of him, with screenings scheduled through the rest of 2026.
Read Sinema Focus's review of "Memories of Love Returned," which was published last year.
