Arts & Entertainment
Documenting our lives
Story of slain Ugandan activist among LGBT stories at Silverdocs festival
Silverdocs Festival
June 18-24
AFI Silver Theatre
8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring
‘Call Me Kuchu’ — June 20 at 9:30 p.m. and June 22 at 8:30 p.m.
‘How to Survive a Plague’ — June 20 at 7 p.m.
‘Ray: A Life Underwater’ — June 21 at noon.
Individual tickets cost $12, however Silverdocs is offering various package deals that allow access to multiple screenings and the conference.A scene from ‘Call Me Kuchu’ showing Uganda activist David Kato in what would end up being the last year of his life. (Still courtesy Silverdocs)
When two filmmakers set out to capture the work of LGBT activist and Uganda’s first openly gay man, they didn’t realize they were also filming the last year of his life.
“It was an incredibly hard thing to go through,” says Malika Zouhali-Worrall of her work with the late David Kato. “We spent a lot of time with him while he was working and during his private time. It came as an awful shock to both of us.”
Worrall and fellow filmmaker Katherine Wright tell Kato’s story in their new documentary “Call Me Kuchu,” which is screening in the upcoming Silverdocs Festival at the AFI Silver Theatre, which kicks off Monday for its 10th year. It’s a seven-day film festival with a five-day conference that promotes documentary film as an art form.
Sky Sitney, festival director of Silverdocs, says the movie will shock those who are largely unaware of what is happening in Uganda while drawing viewers close to the subjects.
“I think it is the way the film takes the topic and weaves it through personal stories, allows intimate access so that you are deeply invested in their lives, that makes it so powerful,” she says.
Worrall is a freelance reporter for CNN and this is her first feature length film. Wright was a film studies and anthropology major at Columbia University and has produced other feature length films including, “Gabi On the Roof in July,” while also directing shorts.
Worrall and Wright began filming in January 2010 after a transgender man named Victor Mukasa won a court case in the high court of Uganda, granting him his right to privacy after it had been violated during a raid. They shot the film with a less than $300,000 budget provided by various backers and a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. The filmmakers chose the term “kuchu” because this is the umbrella term used there for members of the LGBT community.
The film observes Kato and other activists as they fervently try to get Uganda’s homophobic laws repealed while preventing a new anti-homosexuality bill from passing in parliament. The new law would have HIV-positive gay men sentenced to death while others would be sentenced to life imprisonment. Kato was one of the founding members of Sexual Minorities Uganda, an underground movement for LGBT rights. However, Kato’s life abruptly ended when a man named Sidney Nsubuga Enoch, a local gardener and apparently a well-known thief, murdered him in his home.
At the time, Wright and Worrall were in New York planning their next trip to Uganda to shoot. They decided they needed to go back to Uganda immediately — Wright left the next day.
“We realized our film suddenly became about the last year of Kato’s life and added a sense of urgency, it was really intense,” Worrall says.
Though the documentary is LGBT specific, it was not this element that attracted Worrall and Wright to Uganda.
“It wasn’t so much that I was interested in LGBT rights more than any other human rights, but more that these people had these destinies laid out for them by these laws,” Wright says.
To fully depict the causes of these laws and their effect, the filmmakers traveled back and forth between anti-gay community members and LGBT activists. Both Worrall and Wright say it’s important for American audiences to understand what inspired the creation of the new bill.
“Getting all the basic facts is really important,” Worrall says. “Understanding what is happening in Uganda, and that it is very much related to American evangelicals and American foreign policy.”
Specifically, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, all American evangelicals, were invited to participate in a workshop in Uganda in 2009 where they spoke about the international “gay agenda.” According to a New York Times article, Lively told attendees that gays sodomize children and would destroy the culture. Soon after the bill was proposed, Worrall says they filmed a scene where a group of evangelicals celebrated and praised the government for proposing it.
Despite the hostility toward the LGBT community, members were still able to find ways to enjoy their lives. Wright says capturing these moments was of special importance to them.
“It was invigorating to see how these people were able to organize themselves despite the persecution,” she says. “It wasn’t the narrative victimization that you might have expected.”
Filming members of the LGBT community could still threaten their security, and some declined to be shown on camera for fear of being outed by local tabloids, which list LGBT people by name under headlines, “Homo Terror! We Name and Shame Top Gays,” according to the movie’s website.
Though Worrall and Wright are straight, they wanted to use the work being done by the LGBT community as a different way to approach Uganda, and by extension Africa.
“It was a way to capture a vivid portrait of people,” Worrall says. “Especially now that David is gone it has become very urgent.”
Worrall will be attending the Silverdocs with one of the film’s protagonists, Long Jones. The U.S. premiere of the film is occurring at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday. The screening at Silverdocs will be the East Coast premiere of the film and will occur on June 20 and June 22 near the end of the festival.
“We are very excited to premiere it in the U.S.,” Worrall says. “It was first premiered in the Berlin Film Festival and the reaction there was incredible.”
Sitney says “Call Me Kuchu” will provide a juxtaposition to another film with LGBT themes, “How to Survive a Plague,” which revisits the 1980s when HIV/AIDS was still greatly feared and effective treatment was largely unavailable.
“One film is showing an injustice that is going on literally today and the act of change in positive and negative ways,” she says. “One is a retrospective look, to see what has changed and what has remained the same.”
“Call Me Kuchu,” which runs 87 minutes, is in the running for a grand jury prize while “How to Survive a Plague,” is one of the centerpieces of the festival.
Another film that doesn’t have prevalent LGBT themes but is directed by lesbian director Amanda Bluglass is “Ray: A Life Underwater,” a 14-minute short provides a portrait of 75-year-old deep-sea diver named Ray Ives who has been exploring the bottom of the ocean for 50 years while wearing a diving suit from the 1900s.
Sitney says that including these films adds to the diversity of the festival, but they do not specifically look for films with LGBT themes, or any specific themes, when reviewing submissions.
“We already make this festival exclusively about documentary films, we don’t want to set too many other boundaries,” she says. “We don’t choose central themes, but some emerge unintentionally.”
Sitney says that each film should be accessible to a non-LGBT audience, by breaking cultural parameters to create a “stunning and beautiful quality of work.”
Celebrity News
Madonna nominated for 11 MTV VMAs
Musical icon has been nominated in every decade of her career
While Michael Jackson is the uncontested King of Pop, Madonna can easily be considered its queen. She has managed to maintain relevancy throughout the decades and borrowed from different genres and even cultures. There was Puerto Rican freestyle-inspired early Madonna, the “Evita” moment, Madonna as a guru with “Ray of Light,” and more.
Regardless of how you feel about her acting, she has consistently performed hits for films, garnering her multiple awards.
Her follow-up to the wildly popular “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” “Confessions II” has managed to snag her 11 VMA nominations, more than any artist this year. This brings her total up to 80 nominations, and whatever she takes home will add to her 20 wins.
Madonna’s relationship with the VMAs has consistently included history-defining moments. In 1984, she performed at the first VMA ceremony dressed like a bride, emerging from a cake singing “Like a Virgin.” It was provocative and, of course, got conservatives into a tizzy.
One of her most memorable performances was her 1990 performance of “Vogue” in full Marie Antoinette regalia, which is forever etched in history. She also sang “Hollywood” in 2003 and famously kissed both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. She even eulogized Michael Jackson at the 2009 ceremony.
Fans have long awaited a follow-up to this monumental album. Despite her long career, “Confessions” marked her second Grammy for music achievement. Her follow-up album has delighted the gays and gone viral on social media with LGBTQ folks reigniting their love of Madonna with “I Feel So Free.” She is giving us what we need, much like Lady Gaga dropping “Chromatica” post-pandemic.
Since the album has been released, Madonna united with pop royalty, Kylie Minogue, on a remix of her song “Love Sensation.” The two appeared together on the stage for her set at World Pride in Amsterdam.
(Washington Blade video by Michael K. Lavers)
Rather than releasing a plain old music video, she released a film which strings together multiple celebrity appearances including collaborator Sabrina Carpenter, Benedict Cumberbatch, her longtime friend Debi Mazar, Honey Dijon, Kate Moss, Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, and even her daughter Lourdes Leon. While the state of her biopic is in limbo, Julia Garner appeared in Madonna drag for the video. This video is the lion’s share of her nominations and could lead to an epic performance at the ceremony.
Time will tell how she will top these history-defining moments, but one thing is for sure … it will be a show. This year’s nominations include:
- Artist of the Year
- Video of the Year (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Song of the Year (Bring Your Love with Sabrina Carpenter)
- Best Collaboration (Madonna & Sabrina Carpenter)
- Best Dance (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Choreography (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Editing (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Visual Effects (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Direction (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Art Direction (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
- Best Cinematography (CONFESSIONS II – THE FILM)
You can vote for Madonna on MTV’s website and find out how many awards she takes home and see her soon-to-be-legendary performance at the 2026 VMAs on Sunday, Sept. 27, on CBS, MTV, and Paramount+.
Deja Diamond hosted Nellie’s Drag Brunch on Sunday at Nellie’s Sports Bar.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Movies
‘Maddie’s Secret’ defies campy expectations
An over-the-top, old-school melodrama combined with modern satire
Sometimes, when you think you know what to expect from a movie, it doesn’t match those expectations. What do you do then?
I’m not talking about the unmet expectations of fans, like those who complain that Kubrick’s “The Shining” made sweeping changes from Stephen King’s novel, or start a social media campaign trashing the latest “Star Wars” or “Marvel” film because of a plot twist they don’t like. Those are complaints about content, about a story not going the way it is “supposed” to go.
I’m referring to the expectations we have when we walk into a movie thinking that it’s going to have a particular tone, a specific style, a familiar formula – essentially that it is going to easily fit into a comfortable box, and stay there. What happens when it doesn’t?
That’s the question I found myself asking as I watched “Maddie’s Secret,” the directorial debut from gay actor/comedian John Early, which is now screening in a limited theatrical release. It’s the story of a humble housewife whose doting husband persuades her to turn her love of cooking into a career as a virally popular “food influencer,” only to find that her sudden success triggers traumatic feelings from her childhood; clearly a contemporized hybrid of the melodramatic “woman’s pictures” of Old Hollywood and the “Afterschool Special” style cautionary dramas of ‘70s/’80s TV, it has all the earmarks of being an exercise in “camp” – especially since Early himself stars as Maddie.
To put it plainly, it’s an over-the-top old-school melodrama combined with modern-day satire of online social media fame, with a gay man in a dress playing the lead. What could be campier than that?
And it is campy, make no mistake. Yet at the same time, somehow, it isn’t. From its opening scene (which shows us Maddie as she jogs to her dishwashing job at the headquarters of an LA test kitchen/content studio named “Gourmaybe”), we expect things to get wacky. The ingredients are definitely present for it, like her aggressively butch co-worker/BFF Deena (Kate Berlant), who is clearly nursing a serious “girl crush”; bitchy TikTok star Emily (Claudia O’Doherty), who demeans her and ridicules her ambitions of being a chef; and boss Zach (Connor O’Malley), a womanizing corporate “bro” who enthusiastically embraces all the toxic traits we associate with that description.
As the story opens up beyond her workplace, there are more elements that feel ripe for the kind of histrionic humor we might expect from a film by John Waters, or the stylish old-school parody of Charles Busch, or even the radicalized sexual transgression of Bruce La Bruce: Maddie’s adorably bearish husband Jake (Eric Rahill) could be made into a goofy caricature with a food fetish, and her estranged, abusive mother Beverlee (Kristen Johnston in a deliciously grotesque performance) is easily monstrous enough to be at the campy center of any “hag horror” from the ‘60s.
And when we finally discover her “secret” (spoiler alert: it’s an eating disorder that returns when the pressures of being a popular social media chef bring up old feelings about her relationship with food), it’s easy to imagine a different filmmaker taking the whole thing in a thoroughly savage direction; the potential for tasteless, excessive, and deliberately juvenile comedy might be limitless, in the hands of a director unafraid of being branded “offensive.”
It’s hard not to see all these possibilities on hand as we watch Early’s film – which he also wrote – and (for myself, anyway) hard not to hope they all play out to maximum outrageous effect.
They don’t. Instead, “Maggie’s Secret” does something so unexpected that it feels, at first, like a mistake: it decides to play things straight.
It’s still a comedy, make no mistake, but it’s not the kind of comedy we think it’s going to be. It doesn’t go for over-the-top anarchy; it doesn’t go for the bitch-slapping catfight between rival divas, or for the running parade of filthy double-entendres, or for the absurd “gross-out” humor that might have emerged from its scenes of binge-and-purge overeating. Well, okay, maybe it does go for that last one, a little bit.
What all this comes down to, perhaps, is that the film gets its laughs – and there are quite a lot of them – without making fun of itself or, more importantly, its characters. The comedy here is built into the story; it comes from its send-up of social media influencers, corporate content creation, media tie-ins, and all the other interlocked microcosms of our “new, now, next” digital culture; it comes from the foibles and fumbles of its characters as they pursue their objectives in the story, from the qualities and quirks of their personalities, from their simply being funny because they feel like being funny; and yes, it sometimes comes from the obvious cliches of form that we recognize, the plot formulas and sudden revelations and shocking twists that have emerged time and time again in these kinds of domestic melodramas, but it does so good-naturedly, in a way that feels like laughing “with” the movie than laughing “at” it.
It also never diminishes or ridicules the seriousness of Maddie’s eating disorder, nor the experiences that come for her when she (spoiler alert, again) ends up going into an inpatient facility to be treated for it; though these later scenes come populated with their own set of stereotypical characters, ready to be exploited, the movie may poke gentle fun, but it humanizes them, too, helping build the film toward an emotional climax that leaves us with the kind of satisfying uncertainty we don’t quite expect from a movie like this one.
Most significantly, perhaps, it never gets its laughs out of the fact that Maddie is being played by a man – and it’s this that makes Early’s film feel more profound than we expect it to be. It’s not a “drag” movie, or a cross-dressing comedy, or anything to do with Maddie’s gender at all. She is a woman, presented without exaggeration or irony, and she just happens to be portrayed by a male actor instead of a female one. There’s no joke involved, just an excellent performance.
This is an apt approach, considering that Early cites Waters’ 1974 “Female Trouble” as his inspiration for “Maddie’s Secret.” Though he sets aside the extremes of that classic in favor of nuance and kindness, he takes his cue from its star – the incomparable Divine, who never called himself a drag queen but considered himself an actor playing a part. Early does the same, and it makes his film into a kind of full-circle moment in queer “underground” cinema (if a premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where “Maddie’s Secret” screened to enthusiastic response, can be called “underground”) which pays homage to the legacy of a past icon while picking up the mantle and carrying it in a new – and unexpected – direction.
That’s the thing about expectations: sometimes they are left unfulfilled – and in answer to my own question, as I watched this uniquely winning queer indie gem, what happens just might be something wonderful.
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Madonna nominated for 11 MTV VMAs
