Hey Fiona, how is your life?
It is fine.
Young girl, come inside.
What is your name?
Fiona.
Would you please show Fiona how to move the pieces?
In chess, the small one can become the big one.
In preparing for this interview, I was reading that you cried about ten pages into the script.
You said this was a movie that challenged you and inspired you in a way like never before.
Can you expound on that and just talk about what you wanted to bring to this role?
Ten pages into the script, I cried because it was asking me to do something new.
It was asking me to stretch myself and it was telling a true uplifting story from the African continent on a platform like Disney.
Which is something that doesn't come along very often.
I have grown up seeing Africa as the backdrop of stories told in the West.
Or it's about strife, it's about war, it's about warlords, it's about political corruption and medical testing and all these things.
And often times it's told from the outside in and it's still from this perspective of a visitor to the African continent.
Rather than it being told by the Africans themselves.
And here is this true story where the Africans are front and center.
And not only that, it centers on a young girl, a young girl from a small place with a big dream.
And she achieves that dream with the help of a mentor and her mother in a community that supports her.
And that journey was just something that I could tell ten pages in, I had to be a part of.
Are all your children to come with us to King's College?
And I will find a way for them to enter school.
You speak no sense.
Let them come and when we return I will put them in private classes with the best teacher in Kampala.
I am allowing them, if you do not keep your promise, you will never see my children again.
Harriet in particular, the character I play, sees the world completely differently from how I view it.
I was raised to dream out loud, my mother made me fill up dream charts and so on.
And here is a woman who is afraid of dreams. She is suspicious of dreaming and sees dreaming as the enemy.
Because when you expect more than what you have been given, in her experience you get disappointed.
And she wants to protect her children from that disappointment and prepare them for the life of strife that she is known.
And yet she has to come to this place where she realises to honesty and truly show her daughter love is to act not out of fear, but out of radical hope.
Check.
No, no, no. Fiona, you never tip your king so quick.
Why not? When you are going to be beaten anyway.
Focus on what you have.
Coach, I think you do not come from here.
The excitement for me comes from obviously you being a part of this, but also David Yellowo being a part.
And you guys share such similarities, you both have a stage background, you played such pivotal roles in movies depicting black history,
him and Selma, you and 12 years of slave.
Talk about some of the lessons or approaches that you garnered from working with him.
David was just an incredible leader and he was the leader on our set, you know, because he has the experience and he was playing this mentor.
Robert attended being an unbelievable human being.
I mean, I just do not understand how you can be so generous and selfless.
That is how it is done. You feel right handed.
Actually, the clock has to be on your left side because after that you have to give the person 20 lines.
David led with such calm, you know.
We were shooting in quite chaotic conditions, but David was always so calm and encouraging.
And there was an ease at which he worked that put everybody else at ease, you know.
And so he was just a great person to go on this journey with.
And I look forward to going on the Americana journey with him as well because he is just that.
He is so present and so on board.
Mira Nayir runs a set where you roll up your sleeves and you get to work.
Action!
David is all for that.
And so it was, we didn't have very many scenes together, but when we did, they were sparring.
You know, we sparred together and the back and forth was so enjoyable.
And, you know, we both became mentors to these children and I definitely felt a brotherhood or sisterhood working with him.
What is preventing you from being a grandmaster?
I do not know about being a grandmaster.
Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.
You belong where you believe you belong.
This movie is filled with a myriad of motifs.
You talk about dreaming big, you talk about perseverance, love.
What is one of the things of this film that stuck out to you the most?
Genius resides in all sorts of places and it's not about where you're from.
It's about where you want to go.
But also, the dreamer needs the support of the people around them to achieve the dream.
If Fiona did not have Robert Katende, she may never have discovered chess
and she may very well still be stuck in the paradigms of the world she was born into.
But it was that mentor who planted a seed in her that she was then able to water and grow.
So it's so important for a community to learn what their role is,
that it does take indeed a village to get one person to realize their fullest potential.
Checkmate! She won! She won!
Fiona has won!
Hey Joseph, you are not serious. A girl has given you a checkmate.
What?
Sorry, I'm just a lucky beginner.
I will never ever play you again.
Your best sales pitch. Why should people go see this film?
People should go see this film because it's fun and it's ticklish and it's inspiring.
This is a world you may never get a chance to step into and we are bringing it to you
with full force, you know, with a very, very large heart and a large message.
And it will appeal to everyone.
We can all relate with wanting something that we don't believe we deserve or is possible
and you can take yourself to this film as you are and it will embrace you.
