Again, unicode objects in python are not utf-8, they are either utf-16 or ucs-4 depending on compile time options.
Do this:
Code:
if isintance(u_genre, bytes):
u_genre = u_genre.decode('utf-8')
before you use u_genre anywhere.
And from the sound of it "totally supports utf-8" is totally incorrect, if it is yielding bytestrings from the csv file instead of unicode objects.