Discovering that Phiona seems gifted at the game, he encourages her to enter competitions, in large part because he wants her to think about escaping a world in which she can’t even afford schooling.īased on a 2011 ESPN The Magazine profile, Nair’s first feature since The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tasteful, sympathetic look at people learning to cope in difficult circumstances. She soon meets Robert (Oyelowo), who has a passion for chess that he wants to pass along to the local kids. Set in the impoverished Ugandan community of Katwe, the film introduces us to Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), a young, vivacious girl who lives with her siblings and widowed mother Harriet (Nyong’o) in the mid-2000s. But outside of the family-film crowd, Disney may have a tough time wrangling audiences to this true-life tale. The presence of David Oyelowo and Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o will spark interest, as will the story’s sports-movie framework. Premiering in Toronto, Queen Of Katwe is set to arrive in US theatres on September 23. Queen Of Katwe is too dramatically tidy, each step of Phiona’s remarkable path neutered of drama until it seems preordained. Perhaps it’s simplistic to say that director Mira Nair has fashioned a good-looking but Disney-fied version of actual events, and yet the studio’s predictably uplifting-at-all-costs blandness slowly but methodically drains the material of its richness. Queen Of Katwe tells a potentially touching story in the stodgiest of ways, its recounting of the journey of a young Ugandan chess prodigy sensitively rendered but also far too formulaic.
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