First of all, let me say this is a great film. Very entertaining and contains some wonderful performances. But don’t be fooled - the film opens with some vague claim that it is based on reality - well yes, it’s based on some reality: there was a guy called Idi Amin in Uganda. That’s probably about it.

People get very strange when they make films - the act of directing a film requires a healthy ego I would imagine, perhaps it is all too easy to let that ego balloon uncontrollably… resulting in bizarre quotes like the following from a BBC interview with Kevin Macdonald, the director:

I think our Amin is an example of lying to tell a greater truth. [...] I think Forest is very authentic to what Ugandans experienced, but if you see Idi Amin on film, he’s not the same person as Forest Whitaker is playing. Forest is a heightened, ‘more real’ version of Idi Amin, if you want to put it that way.

The great Hollywood self delusion: ‘Lying to tell a greater truth’. Our fictional version is much more real than the truth.

While the ‘more real’ Idi Amin was at least in part based on the actually real Idi Amin, the protaganist in the film seems far more fictionalised. Some are saying the Scottish Doctor character was based on the British ‘Major’ Bob Astles who, it seems, was head of Amin’s ‘anti-corruption squad’.

But the following quote, from an article on Astles, certainly does not fit with the moral dilemmas faced by the character in the film:

He is unrepentant today about what he did and his friendship with one of the most evil men who ever lived. “I loved it,” he says of that period of his life when he was at Amin’s beck and call. “When my minister (Amin) asked me to do something, I’d do it. And I’d do it all again, definitely.”

And it seems Astles did not return to Britain until after Amin’s fall which is not in keeping with the film either.

So who else could the character have been based on? Perhaps Henry Kyemba, who at least was Amin’s health minister and a longtime friend of Amin’s (though not a doctor) before he defected to britain in 1977, in fear of his life. That sounds closer - but Kyemba was not Scottish or British he was a black man, Ugandan as far as I know.

Kyemba wrote a book called ‘State of Blood’ about his first hand knowledge of Idi Amin, Kyemba defected using the cover of traveling for a World Health Organisation conference.

Why not just tell Kyemba’s story? Presumably because this fictionalised version is more real.

Bottom line? If you want to see a great fictional film, go see The Last King of Scotland.

If you want to know about Uganda and Idi Amin you might better off reading Kyemba’s book, or maybe watching Barbet Schroeders documentary (available on Amazon.co.uk) - clips of which were used at the end of The Last King of Scotland.

I certainly intend to watch the documentary, as luckily it’s available on Google Video: