Away from its mainstream cinema scenes and acts, Moise Ganza,26, is a budding filmmaker, whose  works are already striking across local and international platforms But his passion for film kicked off way back in primary school when he developed a fascination and curiosity for what went on around films he watched.

From escorting his elder brother to video libraries to watching some of the films, he developed a passion for film. “I used to enjoy Jackie Chan’s the behind the scenes, which I could only fantasize into my own through writing,” Ganza explains.

While embarking on his dream of developing comic books, meeting the Ultimate Fighters — a group of young aspiring filmmakers — who were students at St Andre Secondary school in Nyamirambo was another experience that paved the way for Ganza.

Having curated one of their action films, it was screened over three times for students, who loved it. This further sparked another shift for Ganza. Following this, after high school he was a cast on a film project, which didn’t work out after production.

 “It was quite an experience of learning for it exposed me into more scriptwriting and software, which groomed me,” Ganza said.

But with his focus more on film writing, especially for comic books, Ganza was widely advised by friends to venture into filmmaking.

As a writer, director and producer, Ganza’s film craft is inspired through deeper African stories of life experiences and impact. Despair (2016), an eight-minute film which depicted his life after high school, where he was at crossroads on whether to pursue further studies, the pressure from societies or to follow his passion, was his first film, a project which met various challenges in production, introduced him to reality in filmmaking.

This film won an Award at the Uganda Film Festival. Umuturanyi (2015), a film made through the Maisha film lab workshop is another great project which introduced him to professional filmmaking.

In 2017, he was invited to Luxor African Film Festival in Egypt, where he was expossed to further expertise. While there, he produced a film titled Scout. As an assistant director on Nameless, a 2017 film directed by Mutiganda Wa Nkunda soon to be released, things further got on track, into more opportunities.

Ganza has also starred in recent films like I got my Things and Left (2019), directed by Philbert Mbabazi, and Fish Bowl, by Ngabo wa Ganza in the same year before creating Limbo (2020), a short film on mental health.

His film Tears, which is still a project in development won a prize at the 2019 Kigali Audio-Visual forum. Onto the same project Ganza together with Deve Shema, who are both from Kirui MFN, a Rwandan film production house was recently awarded an Internship training with Atelier in Kigali by 2020 OUAGA Film Lab Awards. This mark followed a 10-day network training at Burkina Faso’s OUAGA Film Lab, which took place in November last year.

With further working together with other filmmakers, one of the highly anticipated film projects still underway is Kinema, a film co-produced by Imitana Productions, which was featured at the Takmil in the 2020 JCC Carthage Film Festival.

 Though he hasn’t garnered a lot of accolades, Ganza values the platforms for screening and the feedback, which he believes hold greater impact, “Most are personal write-ups from people, which I can’t match with any award,” Ganza states. To him, the world today is more exposed to quality film, which requires an investment of money, time and people, “Films are being produced, though the gap for consumption is narrow, and will slowly be bridged,” he noted.