Snowfall in Uganda? Welcome to the world of A Vineyard for A Lobster, one of the works-in-progress film projects presented during the 2026 edition of Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival‘s co-production platform and talent development program for filmmakers from equity-seeking communities and regions where artistic expression is at risk.

It is in the works from Talemwa Pius (short films Engaito, Rations, Bitingu) and producer Emmanuel Gashumba of Uganda’s Gripmagic Uganda Limited.

The team behind the project, presented during the second edition of Open Doors with a focus on films from Africa, was one of the two main winners of the Open Doors Grant.

THR has compiled highlights about the movie and insight from Pius about the project and the themes it explores.

Synopsis
The equatorial village of Rukumba has endured months of drought when suddenly snow falls overnight, an impossible event blanketing the land in white. Kamuturaki (48), a failed trader once mocked for selling winter jackets under the blazing sun, becomes an overnight success. Byeitaka (40), a disgraced preacher, declares the snow divine and sells melted snowflakes as holy water to frightened followers. Kagoro (38), the timid chairman, watches his authority erode as the village reorganizes itself around the miracle.

When British envoys arrive, promising support for Rukumba’s independence from Uganda in exchange for access to the snow for scientific research, the village committee embraces the deal as progress. As competing ambitions take hold across the village, tensions rise and unrest erupts, forcing Ugandan military forces to intervene. By the time the snowfall melts, Rukumba is no longer a community but a collection of competing interests each convinced the miracle belongs to them. 

Director’s note
A Vineyard for a Lobster grows out of my interest in how colonial structures continue to shape authority, belief and communal life in Uganda decades after independence. It begins from a question of what happens when something foreign enters a fragile social order and exposes what was already unstable.

In the film, an impossible snowfall in a Ugandan village becomes a political allegory, echoing colonial intrusion. Its origin is never explained; what matters is what it reveals. As each character assigns the snow’s meaning according to their needs, the village begins to fracture. I explore how collective failure forms through ordinary self-serving decisions. The arrival of outside interests reflects a pattern that has shaped much of Uganda’s history, where promises of advancement often come tied to the erosion of local agency.  I want the film to feel grounded and unsettling, immersing the audience in a community breaking under its own contradictions. 

What was the inspiration for you to want to make this film?
The film came from a question that has been sitting with me for a while. What really changed after colonialism, and what didn’t.

Growing up in Uganda, you get used to certain things just being the way they are. But at some point you start feeling that a lot of these colonial systems are still there. The way authority works, even how belief is organized. It looks stable on the surface, but there’s always tension underneath it. 
The idea of snow falling in a drought-stricken village came as something like a foreign presence entering a place and forcing people to respond to it in different ways. From there, the story became about what that kind of presence would expose in the village. The snow doesn’t break the village. It brings to the surface what was already unstable, so we can finally see it clearly. Almost like putting a face and name to it. And then the question becomes, now what. How do we become responsible to each other? How do we build better systems?

I’m interested in how people react to it. Some try to profit from it. Some turn it into belief. Others try to control it. And in the middle of all that, you start to see how weak the sense of collective responsibility really is. 

That’s where the film comes from for me. Not the event itself, but what it reveals about people when something bigger than them enters their world.

How universal are the themes of the film, and why should people outside your home see it?
Even though the film is set in a small Ugandan village, it’s really about colonialism across time. Not just what happened in the past, but what carried forward, and what is still happening now in different forms. You can see it in how resources are controlled and how decisions are made for communities from the outside.

The film speaks to people who have lived through that kind of history, and also to those who are experiencing it in the present, whether they call it that or not. Because at its core, it’s about what happens when something external or foreign enters a system and begins to reshape it, and how people respond to that kind of pressure. 

At the same time, it’s also about responsibility. About what happens inside a community when systems are weak, when accountability is not strong, and when people start choosing individual survival over collective responsibility.

We are very conscious of that while developing the film. Even though it has a strong commercial direction, we’re also thinking about how it can create impact beyond the screen. We’re already considering an impact campaign that can engage with communities where these questions are still very present, not just in Uganda but in many parts of the world. So the film is not only meant to be watched but it’s meant to start these kinds of conversations.

What is the next step for you and your collaborators after Open Doors?
Right now the focus is on writing the script. Open Doors helped clarify a lot of things, so the next step is to sit with that and push the project into a solid draft.

At the same time, we’re continuing conversations with collaborators we connected with in Locarno, and looking at how to structure the project for the next stage of development and financing.

We’re also considering a short film version of the project as a way to further explore the world and tone, and to build momentum around it as part of the larger journey of the feature.

So the focus is really just on moving the project forward in a concrete way, both on the page and around it. 

Widow’s Bay fans rejoice! Creator-showrunner Kate Dippold has a progress report on the Season 2 writers’ room.

“It’s great,” she said during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “Week 3, feeling great. I think it’s fun. I feel like I always look at Season 1 — what was really hard with that is having to lay all the groundwork. ‘Haunted Island’ sounds silly and terrible, honestly. I’m still happy they all signed up. It’s a tough pitch. I feel like a lot of groundwork was laid in Season 1 so you can buy it. So, it’s making Season 2 much more fun.”

Then, with a glance at her fellow panelist and lead actor Matthew Rhys, she deadpanned, “But no Loftis.”

In addition to Dippold and Rhys, the panel chat included executive producer/director Hira Murai and co-stars Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root, Dale Dickey and Jeff Hiller. Watch their conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.

In Apple TV comedy series Widow’s Bay, Rhys stars as Tom Loftis, the slightly desperate mayor of an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Along with the town’s hard-drinking fisherman Wyck (Root), and the town hall staff of Patricia (O’Flynn), Rosemary (Dickey) and Dale (Hiller), Loftis tries to ignore a centuries-old island curse while attracting tourists to the island.

RELATED: Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio – Deadline’s Complete Coverage

Murai recalled facing one of the show’s key challenges going into it. “The immediate thing I thought of is, if you had the wrong actor, this whole thing falls apart. And I’m only saying this because I know Matthew hates getting compliments on-camera. And I honestly wasn’t sure it was going to work until we met Matthew.”

Rhys, who also signed on as an EP, said he was on board from the get-go: “I always knew I wanted to do it because I’d never read anything like it. And it was so ‘other’. It was so needed. It was sort of refreshing. But the most important thing to me is I desperately wanted to know how it would end. Because I was like, “Yes, I know.” And yes, and I was like, “But what’s going to happen?” When so much was teed up in the planning, I was like, “Okay, what’s going to happen here because I need to know. And the only way that’ll happen is if I’m in it.”

He also joked that his friends back home in Wales see exactly why he warmed to Widow’s Bay. “They said, ‘That is Wales. It’s like that’s just a busman’s holiday for you. There’s nothing different about that. That’s like an average afternoon in Fishguard [Wales].’ So yeah, they were like, ‘Well, of course you did that. That’s where you came from.’”

L-R: Stephen Root, Hiro Murai, Dale Dickey, Katie Dippold, Matthew Rhys, Kate O’Flynn and Jeff Hiller

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Matthew Rhys

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Dale Dickey

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Kate O’Flynn

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Stephen Root

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Katie Dippold

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Jeff Hiller

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Hiro Murai

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

Matthew Rhys

Anthony Avellano for Deadline

O’Flynn’s character of Patricia has become something of a popular phenomenon. Why does she think people relate so much to Patricia? “She’s like people that are a bit annoying that don’t do the right thing, and then sometimes they step up and they’re brave, and sometimes you see them loving and sometimes you see them being a bit bitchy… That I find comforting TV, which is, real people. And I think that’s what everyone’s responding to. And I’d say that they’re responding to all our characters because all of them are so well written.”

As for what she wishes she could take from Patricia into her own life, O’Flynn says, “I wish I was as smart as her when it comes to the final girl montage creative problem-solving that she does. If I could knit that into my life, that would make it a hundred times better.”

Dickey said she immediately responded to the script and her character of Rosemary. “I was laughing out loud, and I don’t usually do that. It was just, my god. I could picture the people in my head in this world. I could visualize them. And I related to her laidback-ness and her just self-assurance just to be who she is and say what she wants to say, whether it’s annoying or not.”

As for what the cast would like to see in Season 2, Root said, “I would love to know more about the backstory. What made Wyck Wyck? What kind of scenes did he see when he was a kid or a young man to make him to want to be a protector of the island to get him to the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore and he said, ‘No, I’m not sitting back anymore. I’m going to tell this mayor that I don’t respect, that I’m going to come out and I’m going to sound the [warning] siren.’”

Hiller said of playing Dale that his longtime background doing improv with Dippold came into play at times, even when it wasn’t meant to. “That was actually very tempting. And I didn’t always succeed. They said, ‘We’ll cut around that.’”

He did however, sneak a bit of improv into the final cut. “One that I think I’m weirdly proud of that literally no one has said that they liked is when Tom is talking and saying, ‘I don’t think this microphone is on.’ And then I say, ‘I can hear you.’”

He also enjoyed that the town pub, The Salty Whale, became a sort of de facto green room for the cast. “We would sit around in little director’s chairs and it’s just very exciting to be around other actors and especially actors like Dale and Steven are. You just said how many roles they’ve been in, and every role comes with a story. And so, hearing those stories was really good.”

The Beatles have returned home to Abbey Road as Sam Mendes creates a piece of music history for his upcoming four-part biopic.

This weekend, drone footage circulated on social media from above the set of The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event, where the director recreated the Abbey Road (1969) album cover at the now iconic crosswalk outside Abbey Road Studios in London.

Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn, Barry Keoghan and Harris Dickinson could be seen crossing the street multiple times during production in the clip.

Deadline reported last week that production was heading to Abbey Road for a scene that “involves approximately 80 extras and some vintage vehicles.”

Last February, Deadline exclusively revealed that Mendes is set to direct each installment of The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event, through his Neal Street Productions and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Each film will connect, telling the band’s story from each member’s point of view.