Ugandan film producer and director, Loukman Ali whose film, The Girl in the Yellow Jumper, has become the first Ugandan production to feature on Netflix has opened up on his long-life struggle with Dyslexia.
Loukman recently opened up on his childhood ordeal and how he struggled to write while in school.
The filmmaker has earned a reputation for himself as a director, cinematographer and graphics designer due to his love for perfection along with a character of tenacity. After abandoning university (which he felt wasn’t worth it), he got a gig at Fenon Records as a visual editor and then did several gigs at different agencies in Kampala.
“I have dyslexia. It is very difficult for me to write because the way I process words is more of images for me,” he said recently in an interview.
RELATED: Loukman’s ‘The Girl in The Yellow Jumper’ is the first Ugandan production on Netflix
Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by difficulty in reading.
It occurs in children with normal vision and intelligence.
Symptoms include late talking, learning new words slowly and a delay in learning to read. Most children with dyslexia can succeed in school with tutoring or a specialized education programe.
“My teachers always asked me why I seemed to grasp things in class yet struggled when it came to writing exams. When I started working for an advertising agency, I would never attempt to write anything. I was extremely careful to hide this (dyslexia) because I feared that people would think I lacked knowledge,” Loukman said.
His confidence was boosted when his work (paid-for commercials) began to gain traction.
Technology also came to his rescue. He didn’t struggle with spelling errors since there were plenty of Apps and software for spell checking.
Since filmmaking involves writing, Loukman says he has continued to struggle with dyslexia to this day.
“If I have a good story in my head, all I care about is coming up with a good idea – how to make the story or character personal to everyone. Not the spelling mistakes because that’s already taken care of by technology,” he said.
Despite the difficulty, Loukman has made a name of himself as a remarkable filmmaker and graphics designer in Uganda. Partly, he attributes his success to the grooming he got from his parents while growing up.
His parents did not tolerate mediocrity, he said. This meant that when he was making his drawings, he had to give them his all. This also made him his best critic.
Loukman began drawing in his formative years. At age 5, he was sketching scenes from the films he watched as his way of reliving the experiences in the films. Then he would share these stories (in his art book) with friends at school.
At 31, Loukman’s 2020 short film, The Girl in the Yellow Jumper, has become the first Ugandan production to feature on Netflix. However, the story of The Girl in the Yellow Jumper and Netflix wasn’t apparent, he said.
“It was going to fail had it not been the skills I attained (working in agency and learning motions graphics in Norway). Many people walked out on me while filming The Girl in the Yellow Jumper because they had no patience. That is why we ended up with a mask in the film. It was never intended to be like that. Whoever was available that day, wore a mask and did the work,” he revealed.
With the different people doing the same role, he ended up dubbing to maneuver the voicing challenge.
“I ran out of money half way through the film. The film was taking too long and I didn’t have the money..… There was a time we were shooting in the forest and we got kicked out. There is a scene we shot where we shot the main actor from a low angle with some people holding branches to make it look like a forest.”
On how this strenuous project finally got the attention of Netflix, he says a captivating trailer did the magic.
The catchy trailer went viral in the movie circles across Africa and Loukman started to get phone calls from different players in the film industry.
“They connected me to someone in charge of acquisition at Netflix, then this person told me I needed a distributor who would recommend me.”
“The distributor, luckily for me, was already a fan of my small videos that I was doing. It was not a big process explaining myself. We signed paperwork and left the rest of the work to them.”
