Document Opening Gala God Loves Uganda

God Loves Uganda
Dir. Roger Ross Williams, USA 2013

The Evangelical movement in the United States is a multi-million dollar machine. With fewer and fewer people to convert in the steadily secularised west, missionaries trained at American churches go over to Uganda, where their anti-gay preaching is accepted.

This movement, fuelled by American money and idealism, produced a noxious flower – Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which made death one of the possible penalties on the legal statute for homosexual activity. Committed to the idea that God wanted all forms of “sexual immorality” eliminated from the earth, it was the reason why Uganda had dismantled its successful AIDS programme in favour of an abstinence-only policy.

God Loves Uganda is a powerful film that explores the standoff between Gay Rights and Fundamentalist Christianity in 21st century Africa. Through interviews with activists, missionaries, church leaders and politicians, Williams has crafted a film that tries to understand the shortsightedness of brand-name Christianity in a place where people are not legally allowed to be who they are.