Forget The Director, This Is Emmy’s Cut! will have its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), marking a major international moment for a bold cinematic work grounded in Ugandan popular culture.
The film centres on VJ Emmy, Uganda’s most celebrated Video-Joker, whose voice and presence have made him one of the country’s most recognisable movie stars, despite never appearing on screen.
Across Uganda and East Africa, Video-Jokering is a deeply embedded cultural practice in which foreign and local films are live-dubbed or narrated with translation, satire, improvisation and political commentary.
Far from being a simple voice-over, VJ-ing radically transforms imported cinema into locally rooted storytelling. Through Luganda and English narration, VJ Emmy blends humour, social critique and performance, collapsing the boundaries between audience and screen, fiction and lived reality.
These communal viewing spaces, once central to everyday life, are vanishing under economic pressure and digital consumption.
When Emmy steps into a kibanda with a microphone, cinema becomes collective again: noisy, participatory and alive. Desmaret deliberately refuses to explain or frame Emmy’s work, instead handing him full control.
Emmy VJ-s not only famous films, but also his own image, his city and the film itself, rejecting traditional cinematic hierarchy.
Marion Desmaret, who works between Uganda, France and Germany, began her career at ARTE before moving into independent documentary and experimental film.
IFFR’s selection of the film underscores its global relevance. Known for championing politically engaged and experimental cinema, the festival provides a fitting platform for a film that challenges how stories are owned, translated and circulated.
In addition to the screenings, VJ Emmy will stage a rare live VJ performance in Rotterdam, transforming the cinema into a performative, communal space. The session extends the film beyond the screen, presenting Video-Jokering not as an artifact, but as a living, evolving cinematic tradition.
