Queen of Katwe is a film with heart, soul and spirit

It will squeeze your heart and then expand it like an accordion, Mira Nair told me about her new film Queen of Katwe. What she didn't say is that it also puts a snap in your fingers, a spring in your step and tears in your eyes.

If Nair's Salaam Bombay was the intellectual precursor to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, then Queen of Katwe is its emotional inheritor.

Life in Katwe, a slum of Kampala in Uganda, is desperate - chickens, children, cycles, vegetable carts jostle for space amidst shanties made of wooden planks, but families still say their prayer to God before beginning to eat.

They may have no water to bathe in but when they step out of their homes, they still want to look smart. And if someone asks them how life is, they will say with a smile and a wave that it is fine.

For one such family, where a single mother (Lupita Nyong'o) struggles to raise four children, one of them, Phiona Mutesi, turns out to be a chess prodigy. The illiterate, unschooled girl finds a mentor in an engineer-turned-sports-evangelist Robert Katende (played by the wonderful David Oyelowo) and blooms under him.

She can visualise a chessboard in her mind and is urged to find her safe square through chess. It isn't easy. The world she is exposed to through tournaments she wins - good hotels, clean clothes, delicious food - makes her a misfit in her own environment, a ghost who belongs neither here nor there.

It also brings her into conflict with her mother, played by Nyong'o with a stubborn tilt to her chin and a proud light in her eyes. Her husband has died and she sells maize for a living, using the help of her children.

But she won't surrender her honour or her soul - she won't even accept money from her older daughter, Night, who finds a rich boyfriend who takes her away from Katwe.

Madina Nalwanga, like every actor Nair falls in love with (and she has a long history of producing stars from Denzel Washington to Riz Ahmed, from Irrfan Khan to Sarita Chaudhary) is soulful, stoic and fun as the young chess champion.

Her open face shows all her emotions - fear of losing, resignation at seeing her makeshift home being flooded once again, happiness at having porridge fill her stomach, and intelligence that helps her plot her strategy.

Chess is a metaphor for life in Queen of Katwe, where the small one can become the big one, and the queen is the most powerful piece in the game. Nair's film is heart-warming but it is also political - like all local films that are universal.

An honest engineer in a government job is like a white rhino; poor children cannot mingle with rich children in a privileged school; and the sports authorities do not have money to invest in good training for bright children.

It's a film with heart, soul and spirit. Where losing doesn't mean failure, and where the pieces can be reset and play can commence again.

The Katwe Cool Cats are like the cats who are running for their lives. "Sometimes the place you are used to is not where you were born," Robert tells Phiona. Indeed, and sometimes a small film from Uganda can make the whole world go wow.

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