Kenyan actress and Oscar award winner Lupita Nyongo is currently in Uganda shooting her new film Queen of Katwe, which will partly be filmed in Kampala. Lupita is said to be prepping for her shoot which will commence in April. She is set to play African chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi’s mother. Phiona’s story also inspired a book, also titled Queen of Katwe, which chronicles Mutesi’s rise from dire poverty to the World Chess Olympiad.
The actress will be joined by David Oyelowo who took the lead role of Martin Luther King in the Selma movie. He will play the role of Mutesi’s coach Dick Katende. Ugandan press claims he is set to jet into Uganda next week.Lupita is set to take the lead role in the movie by award-winning director Mira Nair.
Fiona Mutesi
She is a Ugandan teenage girl who grew up on the streets of Katwe playing chess since her childhood and because of the game, she has travelled and met prominent people like Gary Kasparov, the greatest chess player ever, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton among others.Growing up in the Ugandan slum of Katwe, Phiona’s father died of AIDS when she was only 3 and shortly afterwards her older sister Juliet died of an unknown cause.
When Phiona was about nine, and had already dropped out of school as her family could not afford to send her, she found a chess program run by the Sports Outreach Institute, which taught her how to play chess. In 2010 she played six rounds on board 2 and one round on board one for Uganda at the 39th Chess Olympiad, scoring 1.5 points from the seven, and as of 2011 she was a three-time Women’s Junior Champion of Uganda.
In 2012, Phiona and Ivy Amoko earned Woman Candidate Master (WCM) titles as a result of their performances at the 40th Chess Olympiad, making them the first titled female players in Ugandan chess history.
That same year Phiona became the first female player to win the open category of the National Junior Chess Championship in Uganda. Also in 2012, a book was published about Phiona titled, “The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster”, by Tim Crothers. Disney has optioned the rights to the book, and is starting work on a movie as of 2012. In September 2013, Mutesi played against Lutaaya Shafiq Holmes who she beat, and thus took the trophy in the Uganda National Junior Chess Championship of 2013, which was held at City Oil Kira Road in Kisementi, Kololo. In 2014, Phiona played in the 41st Chess Olympiad, on the Ugandan women’s team.
