Brow Beat

With the Kony 2012 video nearing 80 million views on YouTube and becoming news around the world, a charity based in northern Uganda decided to screen the 30-minute movie for villagers in the region. As Malcolm Webb reports for Al Jazeera:

A local charity, the African Youth Initiative Network, thought that the communities worst affected by the LRA, when it operated in Uganda, also deserved an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about, and so organized the event.

It was heavily publicized on local radio stations, and a crowd of thousands turned up at the Mayor’s Gardens in the centre of Lira for the sunset screening.

Having heard so many great things about the film, the crowd’s expectations were high.

Critics of the video—and the nonprofit that created it, Invisible Children—will not be surprised to learn that Ugandans who came to the screening Webb witnessed were not happy. “For many here,” Webb says in the report below, “the video is simply puzzling,” as so much of it depicts white Americans whose connection to Uganda is not clear. And, “as the film progresses,” Webb adds, “puzzlement turns into anger.” Webb speaks with men who see the video as exploiting local atrocities for the benefit of a Western NGO. And then “rocks are thrown, the screening comes to a halt, and the crowd scatters into the night.”

Watch the entire report below.

Further listening: Dana Stevens, John Swansburg, and June Thomas discuss the Kony 2012 video on this week's Culture Gabfest.