Deadline’s Doc Talk Podcast: Pop Star-Turned-Politician Bobi Wine On Risking Everything To Oppose Uganda’s Dictator

The Deadline Team

24 October 2023 at 1:39 pm·2-min read

Pop star Bobi Wine had it made. Beautiful wife and kids, thriving music career. The Ugandan singer could have stayed in his lane, cruising through Kampala without a care. But as the award-winning documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President shows, he gave up the easy life for something far more dangerous: attempting through the democratic process to unseat his country’s dictator, Gen. Yoweri Museveni.

Wine and the directors of the documentary, Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp, join us on the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss the film and the intriguing question of why Wine entered the political arena when his only guarantee was that doing so would expose him to great peril.

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Wine explains why he allowed the filmmakers to observe every aspect of his life, and the only thing he asked them not to show – a plea the directors ignored.

Bwayo and Sharp are both natives of Uganda as well. Bwayo describes chaotic scenes filming Wine’s political rallies, which were broken up by the dictator’s shock troops, and how he was shot in the face and tossed into prison during the making of the documentary. And Sharp, who launched the documentary project after meeting Bobi and his wife Barbie in Europe, tells Doc Talk why he’s outraged by a European Union statement about the Museveni regime.

Sharp also tells us about “beyond farcical” moments the filmmaking team captured but left out of the film, which demonstrated the lengths to which Museveni would go to deny Wine the presidency.

That’s on the latest episode of Doc Talk, a podcast hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley and Deadline’s Documentary Editor Matt Carey, produced by Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios and presented with support from National Geographic Documentary Films.

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