Memories of Love Returned is a fugue in which the town of Mbirizi, Uganda’s preserved history, and Ntare Mwine’s own searching eye rise together in harmony.
By Frank Njugi
Sometimes, art begins with nothing more ambitious than a stumble, a wrong turn, or a stray collision with the world that later reveals itself as a profound revelation. Coincidence has a way of ambushing us. A story you never meant to chase suddenly stares back, unblinking. And in that accidental aperture, something transcendent emerges—the kind of art that wasn’t planned, couldn’t be rehearsed, and yet feels inevitable once it exists.
This is precisely how Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine—the Ugandan–American actor, documentarian, playwright, and photographer, known for his roles in productions such as Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer and Showtime’s Dexter: Resurrection and The Chi—found himself caught in the undertow of coincidence’s strange benevolence. Twenty-three years ago, during a forgettable stop in the nondescript Ugandan town of Mbirizi—a place he hadn’t planned to remember—his car sputtered, died, and rewrote the trajectory of two lives.
Mwine stumbled into the orbit of Kibaate Ssalongo, a griot disguised as a studio photographer—a man who had been quietly building a visual cosmos of his community, one portrait at a time. Thousands of images sat waiting in stacks in his old studio at Mbirizi, as if the universe had been saving them for the right pair of eyes.
Mwine felt it instantly—an electric recognition—and what began as happenstance became his responsibility. He helped Kibaate preserve his archive, unaware that the true story would not ripen until decades later. When Kibaate died, Mwine returned to Mbirizi, drawn back by that earlier jolt, the nudge that had started it all. He came to bring the photographs into the light and to give the town, and the man who had captured it, the public exhibition the universe had clearly been conspiring toward from the start.
This long, meandering twenty-three-year odyssey—the unexpected kinship between an itinerant filmmaker and a rural photographer, and the excavation of a town’s memory—becomes the spine of Memories of Love Returned, the Ugandan documentary that has since carved its place across festival circuits. Winner of Best Documentary at the Zanzibar International Film Festival 2025, and the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival the same year, Memories of Love Returned feels like a reclamation.
Kibaate Ssalongo is a rural portraitist whose small studio in Mbirizi is a pantheon of negatives and prints stretching back to the 1950s, a private museum of faces, gestures, joys, and griefs that might have vanished without witness. For Ntare Mwine, himself an acclaimed photographer whose work has hung on the walls of the United Nations, encountering Kibaate’s archive was not merely meeting another artist, but recognising a visual lineage he had not known was his to inherit.
The documentary art form has always been the medium most allergic to pretense, one that trusts the unvarnished pulse of the real. Fiction can seduce, but documentaries confront, holding up the world not as we wish it to be, but as it ages. Memories of Love Returned leans into this ethic with devotion.
Ntare Mwine does not simply tell the story of a talented photographer; he honours the truth Kibaate spent decades gathering in secret: the record of a Ugandan town tracing its own transformations. In those portraits—children becoming parents, fashions shifting, smiles turning tentative or triumphant—Mbirizi is rendered in a way perhaps no historian has ever replicated.
When Mwine mounts the exhibition, the images begin to do what photography does at its best: reconnecting people to the lives of ancestors who truly lived. Families standing before Kibaate’s photographs find their parents’ younger faces, their elders, entire branches of lineage they had not known had been preserved.
As the exhibition unfolds, Memories of Love Returned pivots from collective memory to intimate reckoning, turning its lens on Kibaate Ssalongo himself. Behind the archives of dignified faces lived a man whose own life was neither simple nor serene. He had multiple wives in uneasy balance, family tensions that rippled across decades, and dozens of children whose relationships mirrored the complexity of the images he had produced.
Photography, much like documentary, is about what time threatens to erase. Both forms possess a power, freezing life in motion long enough for us to witness what will one day be gone. In Kibaate’s portraits, we glimpse a Uganda in flux—a country stretching, shifting, contradicting itself. Women in miniskirts move with an ease that would have been unthinkable decades earlier; friends and lovers of the same gender share moments of closeness, gestures that now carry risk. One subject recalls a time in the 1970s when Idi Amin’s regime burned women alive for those very skirts, and today Uganda’s LGBTQ+ communities face criminalisation simply for existing.
The photographs become a ledger of survival and a testament to what a nation remembers. Beyond the country’s mortality lies Mwine’s personal reckoning. He realises that most of Kibaate’s subjects have already passed on, while he himself has faced a health scare—a reminder that even the archivist might not be exempt from the tide he is trying to hold back.
The urgency of restoring and sharing these images becomes achingly clear. “Photography is a stark reminder of our fragility”, he reflects in the documentary. “We must be aware of time, because it will eventually take its toll.” In this awareness, the documentary finds its heartbeat.
The best films—or, in this case, the best documentaries—jolt us into a fuller awareness of the world. Yet, the real jolt happens long before the edit suite or festival premiere, in the miraculous moment when life hands the artist—a creator who makes the production for us, the audience—a fragment of truth they did not even know they needed.
The resulting illumination is profound, because it is the universe, in all its chaotic generosity, briefly choosing to speak. Memories of Love Returned is a fugue in which the town of Mbirizi, Uganda’s preserved history, and Ntare Mwine’s own searching eye rise together in harmony.
*Memories of Love Returned is screening at Unseen Cinema, Nairobi, until 30th November.
Frank Njugi, an award-winning Kenyan Writer, Culture journalist, and Critic, has written on the East African and African culture scene for platforms such as Debunk Media, Republic Journal, Sinema Focus, Culture Africa, Drummr Africa, The Elephant, Wakilisha Africa, The Moveee, Africa in Dialogue, Afrocritik, and others.