“Forget the Director, This is Emmy’s Cut!”: Marion Desmaret on Video Jokering and Cinema as a Shared Conversation

Marion Desmaret is a French filmmaker living in Uganda and Berlin. As an independent filmmaker, she has developed works and documentaries deeply rooted in the East African creative scene. In 2022, she made a documentary, Nightmare of the Nile about the Nyege Nyege Festival in Uganda, the biggest festival for alternative music in East Africa and currently collaborates with their Kampala-based collective and record label to promote the Pan-African music and arts scene.

In 2026, Forget the Director, This is Emmy’s Cut!, her short documentary film, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The short experimental documentary centered on one of the popular Ugandan Video Joker, Emmy Batte, aka VJ Emmy who performs live dubbing and commentary over foreign films in local and makeshift cinema halls. In Uganda, Video Jokering (often referred to as VJing) is a unique and culturally significant form of film commentary and translation. A Video Joker (VJ) is a narrator and guide whose content style is to run commentary over a movie, usually a foreign blockbuster, to translate the dialogue into local languages (primarily Luganda) and add comedic or social commentary.

In this conversation with Culture Custodian, Desmaret spoke about the social impact of video jokering, place of forward-thinking conversations around piracy and copyrights, and cinema as a shared experience and conversation. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Video jokering is a popular cinematic activity in Uganda and neighbouring countries. What motivated the need to make a documentary about it and what do you hope audiences take away from it?

As a French filmmaker, discovering the art of VJing was unlike anything I had ever encountered. My first trip to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, where I’m now partly based, really opened my eyes. While discussing how cinema shaped our childhoods, a friend told me that for him, movies were always about the VJs. He said: ‘If you bring Brad Pitt and a famous VJ to the village, no one will look at Brad Pitt. The VJ is the true hero.’ I loved that image, Brad Pitt standing there unnoticed while the VJ is treated like royalty. In Uganda, the VJs’ voices are the soundtrack of the country, you hear them blasting from speakers on every road and in every city. But beyond the entertainment, it’s a sophisticated form of oral storytelling. What I hope audiences take away is that VJing isn’t just national tradition, it’s a radical act of reclaiming the narrative. In a world where storytelling has long been dominated by Western perspectives, the VJ re-appropriates the image and rewrites the script. It’s a lesson in cinematic irreverence. 

Attention was placed on VJ Emmy and the intricacies of video jokering. When making the documentary, what were you hoping to capture and how did you approach it? 

I first encountered Emmy’s voice before I saw his face. He was sharp and hilarious. He was VJing in English for Isaac Nabwana’s Who Killed Captain Alex?, the cult film and Uganda’s first action movies studios. On YouTube, it reached more than 10 million viewers, many hailing Emmy’s talent. Without his English commentary, this Luganda-language film wouldn’t have reached international audiences. Emmy is the first VJ to take this national sport global (and the one with the best humor, according to the locals), he is a magician with words. Hacking language to create new realities. In Forget the Director, This is Emmy’s Cut!, I wanted to capture that. With my friend and DoP, Ian Nnyanzi, we filmed it like a portrait documentary, then I gave Emmy the edit and he did his magic. Emmy is not just a protagonist in the film, he hijacks it. I’m the director whose authority is constantly interrupted, and that loss of control becomes the film’s engine. It shows how powerful words can be over images. 

In your making of the documentary, how do you think video jokering reflects the changing media consumption habits of  East African audiences?

In the film, I hoped to highlight the magic energy that is a live VJ performance in a kibanda. The kibanda, the local cinema hall of Uganda, used to be everywhere. They were temples of togetherness, where locals would come to yell and laugh, to lose themselves in a story. Cinema as communion. Now they’re slowly vanishing, replaced by generic football broadcasts in bars, while people consume movies at home, on their phones or TVs. In rural areas, the disappearance of these communal screens feels even more brutal. 

These are the places where VJs go and perform every week to live audiences, bringing the VJ experience to their fans. But if these places slowly disappear, the human experience disappears. The movie libraries also disappear, renting fewer and fewer DVDs, all favouring the downloaded movie transferred into a USB stick. Movies are now downloaded from street kiosks. That’s why it is important to fight to keep the kibandas alive. In Uganda, my friend Patience Katushabe, who is one of the most celebrated film producers in Africa, started the wonderful initiative called “Kibanda Video Hall,” which has travelled all over the world now, where she recreates the lively kibanda experience to ensure it keeps living. I wanted to make a film that celebrates cinema as a shared conversation, not a lonely experience.

Socially, what role do you think video jokering plays in Ugandan culture, and how does it reflect the country’s values and creativity?

VJ Emmy calls himself a ‘fun teacher.’ Every film he performs is an opportunity to explore a new topic. His commentary is a way to appropriate the message of a film and digest it for local audiences. A banal scene from a Hollywood blockbuster can suddenly become grounds for social remarks that mirror Ugandan culture. VJing allows him to use his voice to engage the audience in entirely new ways. Emmy is famous for raising social awareness, he touches on complex social and political topics, adding layers of humor and subtlety. It’s a way to talk about important things while having a great time. Emmy provides a new experience for viewers through his commentary. 

Emmy provides a new experience for viewers through his commentary. What do you think about this new way of translating the film into digestible language and parlance?

It’s not new. While shooting the film and driving through Uganda’s rural kibandas, I was surprised to see Emmy VJing local films that were already in the Luganda language.  That proves that VJing isn’t about translating or dubbing, it is truly adding another layer of storytelling. The audience needs his witty commentary, it’s a real performance. He breaks the fourth wall to give movies a unique flavor of his own. 

Video jokering, as an art form, prioritizes the creation of another film and it captures the reality of third-world countries cinephiles. Do you think this diminishes the original viewing experience of the audience who might independently engage with a film? 

I don’t want to speak for Ugandan cinephiles. I can only speak from my personal experience. For some of my friends, including the DoP of the film, Ian Nnyanzi, VJing feels like a nostalgic treat, the “smell” of their childhood, whereas for others, it is very much the way they consume films today. I don’t think it diminishes the experience, it simply is a different one. If you want the original version, you can always opt for subtitles. Some would argue that subtitles are another form of distraction. People can choose.

The film screened at IFFR, one of the world’s most forward-thinking festivals. In a world of globalized media, who truly owns a story – the audiences or filmmakers?

Forget the Director, this is Emmy’s Cut! questions authorship, and the title reflects that. I’m a firm believer that disruption opens dialogue. I wanted to create a layered cinematic playground where Emmy’s voice could take center stage, VJing not just films, but his own image, his city, his history. The entire film. The idea was to start with a traditional portrait-documentary, but instead of the traditional seated interview, Emmy takes over and messes with whatever he wants, however he wants. We hear about “reclaiming the narrative” constantly, but it never really feels genuine. I’m very aware that I come from Europe and film in Uganda. 

Rather than pretending to be neutral, the film makes that imbalance visible. Rather than being hidden, authorship is playfully attacked and reappropriated. For me, that’s more honest than pretending the film is objective. It doesn’t mean the director disappears, it means the director is no longer the ultimate authority over meaning. The story belongs to whoever takes it over. 

As a creative, what are your thoughts about video jokering, especially its implications on copyright and intellectual property rights? 

The movie industry in Uganda is pretty hostile to VJs because they are associated with pirated movies, although this is changing now and they are slowly starting to be considered as highly as their peers. Most of their work consists of VJing movies downloaded on the internet which are then sold as DVDs in movie libraries across the country. But they didn’t wake up one day thinking they wanted to be pirates. If they could do things legally, they would, there just isn’t a system in place for that and the movie industry assumes their audience want the “sophisticated” subtitles, not the entertaining VJ whose job is also to educate. 

I don’t think VJs and the copyright question are hurting the industry at all, on the contrary. VJs promote films better than anyone, they are actually the best movie distributors in the country. So if the system could accept them and create a new, sustainable way to work with them while respecting intellectual property rights, it would be a win-win for everyone.