The Last King of Scotland

Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland won Forest Whitaker the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 79th Academy Awards in February 2007 (Whitaker's only Oscar to date) alongside the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor in the same season. The Whitaker sweep was widely regarded as one of the most decisive winning runs of the 2000s decade and reset his career standing as a leading dramatic performer.

The film is adapted from Giles Foden's 1998 novel of the same name; Foden (a former assistant editor at The Times Literary Supplement) had drawn the central conceit of a fictional Scottish doctor as Idi Amin's personal physician from a real composite of various Western advisors who served Amin's regime in the 1970s. The screenplay is by Peter Morgan (the future creator of The Crown) and Jeremy Brock, who would go on to write The Last Station.

Macdonald (until then primarily a documentary director, having won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for One Day in September in 2000) made the transition to fiction with this film. Cinematography is by Anthony Dod Mantle (later Slumdog Millionaire) and the film was shot largely on location in Uganda, the first major Western production filmed there in decades. The Ugandan government provided extensive on-set cooperation, and the production employed several hundred Ugandan crew members. The cast pairs Whitaker and James McAvoy, with Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson and Simon McBurney in support.