When Kampala-based filmmaker Patience Nitumwesiga set out to make her first feature documentary, she chose a subject both fearless and polarizing — Ugandan feminist scholar and activist Dr. Stella Nyanzi. Her film, The Woman Who Poked the Leopard, will screen this month in the German competition at DOK Leipzig, one of the world’s oldest and most respected festivals for documentary and animated film.
The title draws from a remark made years ago by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who once warned his opponents not to “touch the anus of a leopard” — a metaphor for challenging his rule. Nitumwesiga’s film follows Nyanzi after her imprisonment for her unapologetic, often confrontational activism against the Museveni government.
In an interview with Women Make Movies, Nitumwesiga said the film was deeply personal.
“I made this film because our current world needs to hear voices like Stella’s without an adulterated white or male gaze,” she said. “As an African woman who faces the kind of oppression that she faces every day, I understand her rage and I want to document it because I have the same rage inside me.”
She went on: “As a mother, I believe that Stella is who she is because she has the kind of love only a mother knows. A love that comes from loving another human more than you love yourself. And watching the world treat that human like a second class citizen.”
“But Stella is not sitting on the sidelines like many of us and wishing for a better tomorrow,” Nitumwesiga added. “She has thrown her body, family, love and career right in the storm of our increasingly growing fascist world and has chosen a life where she pokes the leopard every day with her poetry, her provocative activism and her lifestyle.”
“I don’t know a single person who is as true to their beliefs as she is,” she said. “Stella will lose an election she wants to win so bad because she does not want to bend her public persona to a homophobic constituency. It is rare to find a person so bold, so selfless and so loving. Part of the reason for making this film is to live vicariously through her courage, but also to document her for our children, for our country and for the world.”
The 2025 edition of DOK Leipzig runs from Oct. 27 to Nov. 2 in Leipzig, Germany. Founded in 1955, it remains a leading international platform for nonfiction and animated storytelling, drawing filmmakers, industry professionals, and audiences from around the world.
Nitumwesiga’s film joins a lineup that reflects this year’s global mood — one marked by political resistance, environmental anxiety, and intimate reflections on identity. Seven of the eight films in the German competition are world premieres, including Russian-born Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, which examines how state-run education in Russia promotes nationalism following the invasion of Ukraine, and German filmmaker Victor Graf’s Nonna, a personal portrait of his grandmother living in isolation in southern Italy.
In the international competition, five world premieres will screen, among them Chilean director Meliza Luna Venegas’ Green Desert, about a landscape scarred by forest fires, and Swiss filmmaker Gregor Brändli’s Elephants & Squirrels, which follows a Sri Lankan artist’s journey to return cultural artifacts home.
The festival’s director, Christoph Terhechte, who will step down after this year’s edition, said the post-pandemic submissions reveal a shift in global storytelling.
“Most of the films sent to us in the post-pandemic period have dealt with family situations and inner thoughts,” he said. “This year, however, numerous documentaries and animated films have returned to looking outward. They address the threat of environmental destruction, resistance to political violence, the fight against exploitation, and strategies for human resilience under extreme circumstances.”
For Nitumwesiga, The Woman Who Poked the Leopard is more than a political statement — it’s a cinematic act of empathy. The film captures not only the defiance of Stella Nyanzi but also the quiet strength of a woman who, in her words, “pokes the leopard every day.”
