Just got back from seeing this truly excellent film. Shot on location in Uganda, it’s the story of a group of very poor children who excel at chess, one young girl in particular. Excellent acting, direction and editing, and some realistic looks at how much of the world lives.
I enjoyed that movie. It’s one of those movies that I got sucked into watching the first time when someone else had it on Netflix, and I couldn’t help myself from stopping to view as I passed by. Next thing you know, you’re sitting down and hooked.
While the movie does take some liberties with the actual history involved, it’s still pretty accurate. I wish it had done more to highlight the actual difficulty of becoming so good at chess, but that would probably bore 90% or more of the audience. 
I liked the movie too. I thought the girl who played the protagonist was really good.
Agree it’s very enjoyable, though a bit too “Disneyfied” clunky-inspirational. For those who like their Inspiring Underprivileged Youth Achievement presented a little more subtly, I recommend the 2015 Pascal Plisson documentary On the Way to School.
The most interesting part of it for me was the credits. All the major characters in the film are real people, not made-up ones or composite ones. The filmmakers didn’t change any of their names for the movie. In the credits, each of the actors for those characters one by one walk into a room and the name of the actor is shown on the screen. Then the real person that they were playing walks into the room and their name is shown on the screen. After a few seconds, they both walk out of the room and the next actor and real person do the same thing.
One disappointing thing derives from the fact that the movie implies that Phiona Mutesi has continued to improve and is now one of the greatest chess players in the world. She isn’t. Yes, it’s wonderful that coming from an impoverished background she is as good as she is. I think that encouraging people from such backgrounds to learn things like chess is great. She’s not a great chess player on a world scale though. She’s very good for an amateur chess player. She’s probably better than anyone who will ever read this thread. Unless you spend time at chess tournaments, she’s probably better than anyone you have ever played. However, it appears that her chess rating means that she is perhaps the 100,000th best chess player in the world. That’s nothing to sneeze at, of course. That means that if you take a random sample of 70,000 people from around the world, she’s probably a better chess player than any of them.
Incidentally, she’s now a college student in the U.S.
Good info, thanks. There were some visiting Ugandan kids at the showing (this is the local African Film Festival) who were very excited that their country was being shown to the world. When we lived in Kampala, we (as part of the embassy staff) had little contact with the truly destitute part of the city. When you drive not all that far out of the city, you see what real poverty is.
Womeninfilm.org does a social media promotion called #52FilmsByWomen encouraging people to watch one film a week by a woman film director. I just so happened to be doing it during the year that this film was released (2016).
Since I’ve also generally been a Mira Nair fan, I went to see this one on opening day and I loved it.
I genuinely thought it had the potential to be a bigger commercial success or, at least, get some awards recognition. I was disappointed to see it released then disappear so quickly with very little fanfare.
I’m glad people are getting to know it as time goes on.
She graduated from college in 2021 with a degree in business administration and is now a business strategy analyst at Microsoft.