Big grant for African filmmakers

Two filmmakers from the African continent have been commended by major film bodies for their bold adaptation of an Academy Award-winning film into a true African epic.

The Boda Boda Thieves, a film by South African producer James Tayler and Ugandan director Donald Mugisha, has recently been selected as one of five films – out of 113 submissions – to receive a grant from the World Cinema Fund at the prestigious Berlinale Festival in Germany.

It’s an adaptation of Italian director Vittorio De Sica’s original 1948 classic The Bicycle Thieves, which won the New York Film Critics Circle award the following year for Best Foreign Film, and an honorary Oscar in 1950. The Italian version was based on Luigi Bartolini’s novel of the same name.