May 3, 2021

by David Osairemen Blighted by tragedy with the death of her father, introduced to the glitz and glamour of fandom, plunged into the throes of depression and its associated issues, the story of this Nollywood fast-rising actress punctuates the irony of fame. Why did you choose acting? Were you open to other career possibilities? I did not choose acting. I never did. It’s more like, acting chose me. I call myself an accidental actress. Accidental actress, interesting. Why? I got into it by accident. I was born in the UK, lived with my parents. Had a dad who was my best buddy; he supported anything I did so long I maintained a certain moral standard. And a mother who’s pretty much like the typical Nigerian mum, nifty with the details and overbearing. Oh yes, they can be overbearing. Hahaha, you get my point. Shortly after my father passed, my mum decided we relocate to Nigeria for reasons I did not find cogent enough. How did he pass? A rare form of brain disease. It was detected late and when it was, the disease had eaten up a large chunk of his brain. So sorry about that. What year was this? 2013. I was barely 18, in my first year at the University. It was a really bad time for him to die. My mum’s suggestion about relocation further deepened my misery. I foresaw an awfully strange restart to my life. And with my father absent, I was certain things were set up to get worse. What was the experience like for your mum? Your father’s death. To be fair, it was no less devastating for her. They were friends, really good friends, this I noticed as the only child. The painful loss scarred my relationship with her. We both grieved in our different ways, mine was mixed with resentment and anger at the prospect of starting life again at Nigeria. I just needed someone to assure me everything would be fine but there was no one. I can imagine. So you did relocate… Yes, we did. Like I envisioned, it was a restart. My mum got me into one of the private Universities. I wasn’t interested in starting up school after everything that had happened but my mum, being who she is, insisted I needed the distraction. Well, did the distraction work? For the most part, no. Everything seemed unpleasantly new and frigging frustrating; the culture shock and the strange way Nigerians perceive life. I struggled with virtually everything… Humor me, how do Nigerians perceive life? Hahaha, believe me, 8 years here and I can say that nobody wings it better that Nigerians. The hustle culture here is the gold standard. Y’all are survivors. That I agree. Welcome to the family… Please continue. In my final year, I got my first shot at Nollywood. Interesting. Please back up a bit, what course did you study at your new school? Physics. Same course I had started in the UK. Great. Please go on, your first shot at Nollywood. It was at a friend’s birthday party. A gorgeous lady told me she’d like to have me on her film. She commended my looks, my body and how much I fit a particular character. She gave me her card. At first, I was tone-deaf at the offer but after careful consideration, I  decided to give it a shot. I needed some fun in my life anyway. So you took the job. Yes. And that was the start to everything acting for me. I got call ups for many TV films, I took most of them and declined the others. Then telenovelas came calling too. I was enthralled by the attention and how my shoddy (well, to me) acting interested people. Did your mum support this? In my head at the time, I cared less about what she thought about it. She had made my life worse and it was my responsibility to make it better. So I thought. Hmmmm In all that glam, I started to develop strange feelings and sensations. I discovered I was at my most excited state around people, particularly on set filming. But alone, my misery replayed in frightening proportions. I cried myself to sleep many nights ( at this point, I had left my mum’s house and started living alone). I had no idea what was wrong with me. I was happy and unhappy at the same time. It got worse when I detested my own company. I craved to be around people more often than is normal. That was the first pointer to depression I neglected. Self loathing. Yes, self loathing. How did you deal with it? I took to my DMs. It was crawling with ‘thirsty’ men who clearly just wanted a piece of me. I engaged them. We planned hookups that often ended up as sex dates. This continued for a long while. Did it not bother you? Sleeping with strangers. It didn’t bother me at all, I was careful to protect myself. And, of course, my nights weren’t dreadful and lonely anymore. Hmmm I think I reached my breakpoint when one of the guys I hooked up with touted drugs to me. According to him, he’s been with many of my kind and that was what they took to stay sane. I was too drunk to think or say otherwise. I got a jab of the drug and I was knocked out good. The next morning, I was useless as the night before. I was alone in the hotel room. I was two hours late for a film call-time. I was too weak to move. In that moment, I realized how far I’d veered off from reason. I cried. I knew I needed help fast. I called my mum immediately, and for the first time in many years, I allowed her be a mother to me. I explained everything to her, she cried, I cried…the call lasted for well over 3 hours. Then,

by Oluwa Damilare Eyimofe (This is My Desire) 2021 is a film that captures, asymmetrically, the three stages of life, death and the in-between. These stages are experienced in two chapters by three different characters in one world – Lagos, Nigeria. The film written and directed by Chuko and Arie Esiri begins with a still frame; a cluster of tired junction boxes and ends with a still frame of darkness as credits roll. The significance of this opening and end is symbolic of the existential givens the film presents – of life, the in-between, and death. Accordingly, the film follows Irvin Yalom’s four existential givens of the human condition: death, meaning, isolation, and freedom. For it is when our hero Mofe [Jude Akuwudike (Beast of No Nation)] loses his sister and nephews living with him that his life takes a detour into isolation and ultimately a long road to freedom. In all of Mofe’s actions, his only sin is to want to leave Nigeria while being clueless to the process of securing a visa and even more oblivious of his purpose in the grand scheme of things. He’s just a weary electrical engineer at a printing press – still employed perhaps because of an ineffective organization, for many Nigerian industries love cheap labour even to their own detriment. They simply don’t care as long as it’s still manageable. Talk about the “patch-patch ideology” Mofe is a kind of man content if you don’t smile back at him. But a man like him can be unforgiving; a man like him can’t stand being cheated. For people like him, they must battle to secure their rightful place in this world and when they start hoarding their smiles, tapping to the discontent sizzling beneath, then there’s a looming earthquake. Even when he does explode, Mofe withdraws quickly, choosing to implode and we hardly know what he would do next. We do not know Mofe more than this. He’s a quiet man with daddy issues, fleeting through the toughest situations, observing, mostly, even in his own tragedy. For Arthur Miller, in his 1949 essay Tragedy and the Common Man, tragedy is driven by man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly and in the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life. Society destroys him. Mofe defeats Miller’s theatrical endgame of the hero’s destruction as he dusts himself and climbs again, partially forsaking his dream of migrating overseas to start his own precious company in a corner shop in this same tragic city. “You only run for the border, when you see the whole city running as well…because prison is safer than a city of fire” – Warsan Shire Tied to the second chapter, the story of Rosa [Temi Ami-Williams] and her pregnant teenage sister Grace (Cynthia Ebijie) exists in what appears to be a lengthier, complex web of events that exposes us to a more vibrant, multicultural life with women at its core. Rosa works as a hairdresser and bartender, two jobs that allow her experience customers of different natures. Rosa is ambitious, stern on her demands, and innocently sly. Her dream to enter Italy with her sister comes with a Mephistophelean price she’s ready to pay. She wants a better life for her sister and she’s willing to use her feminine allure to get what she wants.  Miller affirms Rosa a hero when he imagines that “a hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his sense of personal dignity”. These three characters represent the Nigerian Dream, a pyramid of Nigerians seeking to escape the everyday tragedy. These characters are only victims of society’s flaw.  It is not your fault until you allow yourself become a threat to the existence of others. In an interview with Will Okiche for Sense of Cinema, the Esiri brothers speak about their influences from James Joyce’s Dubliners, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, CS Lewis A Grief Observed, and George Elliot’s Silas Marner to Hou Hsiaos-hsien’s works of the New Taiwanese cinema, Chungking Express (1994), and Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955 -1959). I’m particularly interested in their reference of the New Taiwanese Cinema, a movement acclaimed for its realistic portrayals of Taiwanese life. They are led by a non-conventional structure backed by realism amidst innovative narrative techniques. So conventional structures that typically build the drama to a climax are abandoned and the story is progressed at the pace as it would in real life, stripping society to tackle poverty, class struggles and moral conflicts. This is what Eyimofe picks on. The writing and dialogues are worked thoroughly, almost to sound non-existent. The camera is simply witnessing the characters in their playing field, the “emptiness” is a character artistically designed by the filmmakers to establish a romantic affair with tragedy. “We have a habit of not wanting to assess or critically engage reality.” Chuko Esiri says.   True. The wave of escapist cinema has blinded Nigerian audiences. They have been overfed with so much sugar, unaware that they have been cheated out of enjoying the array of narratives and powerful languages that cinema offers. Many filmmakers are primarily setup for commercial relevance (this is no crime), however, story and technique rot in their prison cells, viewing from a keyhole at their much celebrated box office victories. A review of the film by Hollywood Reporter supports that “with hints of Ozu, Claire Denis and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, this carefully observed and well-performed drama is a far cry from the typical fodder churned out by the Esiri brothers’ native Nollywood film industry, offering up an indie alternative that’s small in stature but large in scope…” This “fodder” is the work of filmmakers, producers especially who are rather uninspired by the realities of the society. And even when they attempt stabs at it, is not far from news report. Many critics are often not motivated to engage films because of this dearth.  The Esiri Bros, graduates