ROSELINE MUTARE
HARARE born multidisciplinary artist Oscar Lwalwe is charting a trajectory that refuses containment within a single medium.
As creative director of BAG Comics, Lwalwe operates at the intersection of painting, illustration, sculpture, printmaking, and cinema, treating narrative as a mutable substrate that must be shaped by the most resonant form.
“Whenever I create a story, I focus on the best medium for its presentation, for me a tale might demand the gestural immediacy of a brushstroke or the temporal grammar of moving image,” said Lwalwe.
His pivot into filmmaking crystallized during his studies at Harare’s National Gallery School of Visual Arts and Design, colloquially known as B.A.T. Already exhibiting painterly work across local and regional circuits, he felt an emergent compulsion to translate the thematic density and chromatic moods of his canvases into cinematic language.
Film and photography had formed part of his academic training, but the transition marked a deliberate act of remediation: transposing the iconography and atmospheric tenor of his painted stories directly into the mise-en-scène of film. That impulse birthed his journey as a director.
The Zimbabwean film landscape, however, presented a formidable counterpoint. Lwalwe identifies collaboration as the most arduous ideal he has championed. Rather than treating the industry as a competitive arena, he frames it as a space for collective contribution.
The reality, he notes, is often characterized by gatekeeping , closed circuits of production houses, proprietary equipment, and insular casting pools. In response, Lwalwe instituted open auditions for cast and crew, a praxis of radical inclusion.
For his forthcoming project WIDOWER, the methodology yielded a performer who traveled from Gweru to participate, evidence, he argues, of the democratizing force that open access can exert.
Autobiographical resonance permeates Lwalwe’s filmography. Tozeza Baba the Movie, which he wrote and directed, functions as a cinematic palimpsest of his childhood, excavating the austere, formative apprenticeship under his father in the latter’s studio before and after school.
WIDOWER, by contrast, channels personal grief into narrative form, reframing the premature death of a close family friend into a study of absence and endurance. Across his work, a throughline emerges, advocacy for male interiority. Lwalwe’s writing interrogates the cultural injunction that silences men, exploring how enforced muteness calcifies into psychological erosion.
His aesthetic seeks to construct dynamic metaphors that mirror, and ultimately destabilize, what he describes as a “bizarre society.”
Through BAG Comics, Lwalwe is also amplifying narratives the global market has scarcely apprehended, Africa’s mythic architectures. His publishing and animation ventures excavate precolonial cosmologies — kings, heroes, deities, and folklore rendering them with production values calibrated for international reception.
For WIDOWER, he enlisted Video Flight Films to execute VFX at a caliber commensurate with Hollywood standards, asserting that African stories deserve the same technical sophistication and visual grammar afforded to dominant cinemas.
Lwalwe’s ambition for legacy is archival. He intends to bequeath a corpus of enduring narratives that will grant future writers and filmmakers the imaginative latitude to articulate their own mythologies. Many of these stories currently exist as sequential art within BAG Comics, though animation pipelines are actively expanding them into kinetic form.
The throughline is clear, a lasting archive of African heroic epics, rendered with the technical fluency and conceptual rigor to resonate far beyond the continent.
As creative director, Lwalwe continues to insist that story precedes medium, and that African narratives must be told with both cultural fidelity and global craft.
