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DVD review: Queen of Katwe [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-16
Talent is often found where no one expects to find it. For chess talent, it is natural to look to Russia, since two of the most famous world chess champions, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, were born in the Soviet Union (though the latter, born in Azerbaijan, is no longer welcome in Russia, having escaped death by window).
No one would have thought there might be a chess prodigy in Katwe, a slum in Uganda too awful to rate being called a “village.” And yet that’s precisely where now woman candidate master Phiona Mutesi was discovered.
Her older sister had run off with some man, much to the disappointment of their mother, Nakku Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o). Phiona (Madina Nalwanga) helps her mother and younger brother barely make ends meet by selling vegetables in the market.
An unemployed man, Robert Katende (David Oyelowo), agrees to work for his father’s ministry by teaching sports to the local children. Mostly football (soccer), which some children fear might hurt their bodies and render them unable to earn a living.
But Robert can also teach the children a sport for the mind: chess. Phiona starts learning the game and soon beats a boy who previously thought himself invincible. The boy can’t accuse Phiona of cheating because several other children witnessed the game and surely at least one of them would have flagged an improper move by Phiona. No, it must be some kind of witchcraft!
Obligatory spoiler warning: though this movie’s based on a true story and you can look up how Phiona Mutesi turned out, I will avoid telling you much of anything that happens in the third act. But it’s not a spoiler to tell you there’s a “where are they now” segment at the end before the end credits.
We don’t really get to see the games early on in the movie. It’s understandable: if you were the director, you would not want viewers to scrutinize those early games, which likely were rather amateurish, and unremarkable without foreknowledge of the players’ futures.
Robert also feeds the children, so Phiona and her younger brother are not hungry when Harriet serves them dinner. Harriet is understandably very wary of Robert. So Robert does his best to convince Harriet to let Phiona progress in her study of chess, and allow the young prodigy to travel to neighboring African countries for tournaments.
The chess checks out when we get to see it. At a tournament in Sierra Leone, Phiona wins with a “smothered mate,” a technique which I learned only very recently after seeing several puzzles involving the technique. I took a screenshot of the movie and tried to reproduce the position in the following diagram, any mistakes are my own. Black to play, mate in two.
Checkmate in two moves, Black to play. FEN: r5rk/p2b2p1/2pP1pqp/1pB5/5P1Q/n5PP/PP2N3/K2R3R b - - 0 1
When Phiona plays Qb1+, her opponent smugly says “Don’t you know anything?” before confidently playing Rdxb1. Maybe the opponent thought Phiona would then play Nxb1, which is answered easily enough with either Rxb1 or Kxb1. But the smug opponent is the one who doesn’t know anything about smothered mates: instead of Nxb1, Phiona plays Nc2# for the win.
It could be a writer’s fancy that Phiona won any game in that tournament with a smothered mate. There seem to be no records from that tournament.
By this point, she had gotten good enough to go play near Karpov’s birthplace, and there are records of those games, such as her game against the Azerbaijan-born Canadian player Dina Kagramanov. I’m going to go in detail on that game a lot more than in the movie.
The game started out plainly enough.
1. e4 c5
2. Nf3 e6
3. d4 cxd4
4. Nxd4 a6
5. Bd3 Qc7
Phiona Mutesi castled first, Kamagranov a little later.
6. O-O Nf6
7. Nc3 d6
8. Be3 Be7
9. f4 Nbd7
10. a3 b6
11. Rc1 Bb7
12. h3 O-O
With that, Kamagranov has her rooks “connected.” Perhaps that motivates Phiona Mutesi’s next move.
13. Qd2 Nc5
14. Kh1 Ncxe4
15. Nxe4 Nxe4
16. Bxe4 Bxe4
17. Nb3 Qb7
18. Rf2 Rfd8
19. Qb4 Rab8
20. Qe1 Bh4
21. Qf1 Bxf2
22. Qxf2 Rdc8
23. c3 b5
24. Bd4 Qd5
25. Nd2 Bg6
Phiona Mutesi has successfully repelled that threat. But now she’s down a rook.
26. Qg3 a5
27. Qe1 b4
28. axb4 axb4
29. Kg1 Re8
30. Qf2 e5
31. Be3 exf4
32. Qxf4 bxc3
33. bxc3 Rb2
34. Rd1 Qd3
35. Bd4 Qe2
36. Qf3 Rxd2 0-1
Phiona Mutesi decided to resign at this point, presumably by tipping her king, a gesture we see in this movie and which is considered an acceptable way to indicate resignation in some tournaments.
How Phiona Mutesi’s game against Dina Kagramanov ended up. FEN: 4r1k1/5ppp/3p2b1/8/3B4/2P2Q1P/3rq1P1/3R2K1 w - - 0 37
Earlier in the movie, Robert tells Phiona to never be so quick to tip her king. I get the sense that tipping your king is a dramatic flourish for movies and TV shows. In real life, it can come across almost as rude as flipping the whole board over. But unlike flipping the whole board over, it can be ambiguous. Like, what if you tipped your king by accident? It is much clearer to offer a handshake and say “I resign.”
In the position that Phiona resigned the game shown above, she theoretically can still win. But that would require Kagramanov to start playing a lot worse than she had so far. And that’s an insult. According to Lichess, both players had played “inaccuracies” and one played a “mistake,” but neither played a “blunder.”
Harriet (Lupita Nyong'o, left) is a little overwhelmed that her daughter, Phiona Mutesi, has been awarded another chess trophy.
I give this movie ★★★★☆ plus a half star. I found the story very well done but at the end, before the “where are they now,” the writers couldn’t quite figure out a satisfying conclusion that would still be true to Phiona Mutesi’s story.
I give the DVD ★★★☆☆ plus a half star. It doesn’t include special features, and even though that is common for DVDs, I still deduct a full star.
The Blu-ray does include special features which I only know about from the movie’s page on blu-ray.com: audio commentary, four documentary features (one about how director Mira Nair got involved, two focusing on the people in Phiona’s life and their on-screen counterparts and the last one about the music for the movie), a short film focusing on Robert Katende (not sure if this was cut out of the movie for time or if it was never intended to be in the movie), music videos by Alicia Keys and deleted scenes with introductions by Mira Nair.
Almost all of the dialogue in the movie is in English, spoken with an African accent, with occasional Luganda subtitled in English. This particular accent sounded a lot more natural to me the African accent in The Woman King.
Queen of Katwe is rated PG for “thematic elements, an accident scene and some suggestive material.“ The movie runs two hours and four minutes, but it doesn’t feel long.
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