‘Call Me Queen’ review: Eliane Umuhire is magnetic in Emily Atef’s well-intentioned drama based on real-life Kenyan AIDS activists

Dir. Emily Atef. Germany/France/Kenya. 2026. 105mins

Adapted from the 2007 novel Mercy by Lara Santoro, the latest film from Emily Atef is a tale of female empowerment. It takes place in Kenya, 1999, where both Irish journalist Anna (Denise Gough) and Rwandan-born single mother Queen (a magnetic Eliane Umuhire) are making a new ife in Nairobi. A friendship forms between the two after the dynamic, driven Queen talks her way into a job as a housekeeper for the chaotic and self-destructive Anna; one which gives them the strength to face both their personal tragedies and ultimately, the unfolding country-wide AIDS crisis. The plotting can feel a little clunky and cursory and the characters sometimes play second fiddle to the issues, but the time and the place is vividly evoked.

The characters sometimes play second fiddle to the issues

A period piece shot on location in Kenya, this marks a change in direction for Atef, whose previous pictures – including the Berlin competition titles Some Day We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (2023) and 3 Days In Quiberon (2018), plus More Than Ever (2022), which screened in Cannes Un Certain Regard – have all taken place in Europe. It’s perhaps because of this that Call Me Queen feels less assured as a piece of storytelling than much of Atef’s previous work.

It’s well-intentioned in its attempt to create a pair of complex female characters, but in condensing the novel into the framework of a feature film, the screenplay does, at times, feel like an exercise in issue box-ticking. Playing in Hamburg after premiering in Toronto, the film will release in Germany on October 15; further afield, it may struggle to assert itself in the competitive theatrical arthouse arena.

The cinematography, by Hélène Louvart, is one of the film’s stronger aspects. It’s a strikingly visual piece of storytelling, with a richly saturated colour palette and sense of the bustling energy of the impoverished neighbourhood where Queen lives with her two children.

But the picture’s main asset is Queen herself, and the eye-catching performance from Umuhire that brings the character to life. She is, it is clear from the outset, a woman who believes in taking control of her own fate. She replaced her given name, Quinta – which she rejected along with the unhappy memories of her early life in Rwanda – and adopted a stately, dignified bearing to match her new moniker. 

Having been abandoned by an unfaithful, alcoholic husband, Queen first turned to illegal means to make ends meet, brewing and selling illicit hooch. But the job with Anna is our first indication of Queen’s formidable strength of will. She introduces herself to the suspicious and reluctant Anna as the new home help, and flatly refuses to take no for an answer. Almost immediately, Queen shows herself to be invaluable, both as a housekeeper and as a fixer, providing interview subjects and opening doors hitherto closed to a white European reporter.

But while the growing respect between the two women is persuasively captured, the close friendship that develops feels a little hurried. One moment Anna, grief-stricken and vodka-sodden following the death of her boyfriend, is lashing out at Queen. Just a couple of weeks later, the formerly healthy-seeming Queen has developed full-blown AIDS. Anna makes it her mission to secure the kind of life-saving treatment for Queen that is inaccessible to all but the very wealthy in Kenya.

The film attempts to sidestep the inevitable charges of a ‘white saviour’ narrative with a few cutting lines of dialogue about privilege delivered by a weary and overstretched hospital doctor. But perhaps more significantly, the dynamic Queen drives the film’s final act, which deals with combating taboos surrounding HIV and campaigning for more widely available treatments. Anna, meanwhile, is reduced to the periphery of the story. One wonders why a white European character was needed in the first place in a film which makes a point of stressing that it was inspired by real-life Kenyan women AIDS activists. Tellingly, one of the picture’s most powerful moments comes when actual documentary photographs of protests are threaded into the picture’s reenactments.