My names are Akello Emmanuel. I’m a student of procurement. I’ve always loved film, and I just love being behind the camera. I wanted to study it at university, and although my parents are supportive, relatives influenced them to deny me my desires. I’m blessed to have such parents. I’m a DJ, and a model, and it is very hard for parents to accept a girl in Gulu to venture into DJaying or modeling, which are considered for ‘spoiled girls’, but my parents allow me to pursue these hobbies. They however wouldn’t let me study film, as they thought it is a waste of money. They don’t yet see that film can be a career, so when I heard of this film training, I knew it was an opportunity I could not miss.
I believe I have a lot of stories to tell. I grew up in a community with an epidemic of teenage pregnancies. When I was in Senior Three, I knew a girl who aborted and she nearly died. And I know another girl, my neighbor, the child of a single mother who was struggling to pay school fees. Then she went and eloped before finishing school, and she got pregnant, and her mother was heartbroken, after all the money she spent, after all the sweat. I don’t know what to think. I felt bad for the mother.
This was not a rape, or defilement, or I don’t know how to call it because she was still at school and the man responsible was working, so it might be defilement. I’m confused. Should I blame the girl? It’s not like the man forced her or anything. She wanted to go to him. But she was a child. Well, in my community girls her age are married, but in law she is a child.
These kinds of confusions fuel the stories I want to tell. I made a short film about a girl who gets pregnant while still in school and it ends in tears. I don’t know yet what messages I want to say in my films, but I have stories and I think the community should listen to stories of school girls who get pregnant.
After the training, a friend asked me to act in his films, which he wants to put on YouTube, but when he saw what I already knew about filmmaking, he suggested I produce the short films for him. And he proposed to me to attend another film training where they also made me the producer. I can say I’m finding my voice. I want to be a director and tell all these stories struggling to come out of my throat.
Written by Akello Emmanuel.