God’s Own Country: The Journey by Will Noelle

Damn.

It’s been…I don’t even want to say how long it’s been since we blogged on this spot. That’s a damn shame, but it won’t happen again.

A lot has happened since the last post. We launched the God’s Own Country movie site and watched as the buzz grew around the net. That’s a always a wonderful thing to see y’know…watching a creative idea you conceived in your mind’s eye grow and blossom into what you thought it could be.

Life also blessed my wife and eye with a beautiful baby girl, so I also feel the true-to-life parallels with Real Livin’ Films and the birth of my little princess.

Real Livin’ was also at the Nigerian Reunion in Atlanta in July, spreading the word and presented attendees at the fashion show with a demo of the film website. My main man Femi will get into that in more detail though, so I won’t steal his thunder. God’s Own Country is also going to screening at the FilmPop Montreal international music festival, so all my Montreal peeps can check us out there.

We’re just really excited to be making our contribution to this African Film Renaissance. We, like many fellow Africans in Media out there, are committed to telling the world our stories and defining our image in the global media space.

What else? Yeah, we’re working on some really cool projects that we hope to premiere on Real-Livin.com in the coming months, so stay tuned. We promise that you won’t be disappointed!

–Will

Diary of a Nigerian Filmmaker – Part II by Femi Agbayewa

After much deliberation I decided for efficiency and flexibility purposes, I was going to film using a two-person crew. I would work the camera and I felt it critical to have a sound technician to round out the crew so I brought my friend Adam Smith on board. One of the things I wanted to avoid with God’s Own Country was the technical deficiencies that plagued Nigerian/African movies (low sound, no sound and sound dropouts). A golden rule within independent cinema is that people can forgive bad images but they absolutely cannot forgive bad sound.

I arranged a meeting with Adam to discuss the exact sound issues we would be facing in Nigeria. Below is the list we came up with.

Complexities:

• A consistent source of power was not guaranteed (In practice it was suppose to be 2 days on one day off, but in reality it was more like the other way around.

• The use of a generator was not highly recommended because that in itself would create a whole other quandary of sound problems

• The voltage system in Nigeria is different from North America

• Because I was going for a documentary run n gun (it was key that we set up in the heart of locations unannounced) look to capture Lagos’s vibrancy, minimal equipment was encouraged

• And oh yeah the equipment would have to be concealed.

• (More on his technical sound packages on a later blog)

After breaking all that down I looked over to Adam and I expected him to walk away with his hands in the air, instead a wry smile came over his face. That’s when I knew the sound was shored up. Till this day I don’t know if he hopped on board because of the challenges or maybe it was because of the free plane ticket I like to think it was the opportunity to be a trendsetter and see and hear the Nigeria/Africa they never show you…

Diary of a Nigerian Filmmaker – Lagos Days by Femi Agbayewa

What follows is a recount of my experiences while filming God’s Own Country in Nigeria.

October 21^st, 2005:

10am

Heard the phone ring. I like to answer the phone on the 1^st ring, but that day I was tired, so I answered on the 2^nd ring. It was my mother (Ms. Bose Agbayewa), when I heard her voice I woke up really quick. I’m always worried when my mother calls me early because it usually means that someone died back home.

The year before, I received a similar call from my father his mother, my grandmother had died in her sleep. But this time my mother was excited, she described her last images of Nigeria before she left. The anxiousness of her last days mixed with the excitement and disbelief that caused her last hours to go by in a blur. However, her memories of home extended beyond those last days and dug deep into her past, these memories became her reference point.

Even though she hadn’t lived in Nigeria in more than two decades, it was those memories that that allowed her to interact and grow with Nigeria as if she never left. In other words you can take a Nigerian out of Nigeria but you can’t take Nigeria out of a Nigerian (whether that is a good thing is debatable).

Why did she tell me this? I think at the time she felt that God’s Own Country would not be complete without images from Ike’s mental reference bank a.k.a home. I remember feeling really awake after she said that, she was 100% right. My focus and question for Ike to explore became, what allows a person who is abroad, to maintain crystal clear images and memories of the Africa they had left behind??

I wanted to include flashbacks of Ike living in Africa from his point of view, to give the audience a peek into his mind and see the images he was carrying. I wanted these images to take the form of flashbacks but with a twist, these flashbacks would not be stagnant memories that were stuck in the past, instead they would be fluid and take place in real time.

I wanted to show that in Ike’s heart he was vicariously living in Africa through his memories as if he never left.

This is an important theme that I will revisit in my other works. I like to think of it as the human condition, my style of storytelling.

Okay back to filming in Nigeria. After looking at budget (which was only possible because I was working 3 jobs at the time!) and time constraints, it was agreed that I would film in Nigeria but the question then became what would be the best way to film in Nigeria?

Next: Technical Challenges filming in Nigeria

Our Culture, Our Movies – Nollywood as a Global Soapbox by Will Noelle

I’m a movie junkie. In fact, it’s fair to say that I’m a movie nut. I mean I’ll watch almost anything and I love almost all genres (except musicals). But honestly, I feel a special pride when I’m watching good African movies. You know the ones I’m talking about: the rich; entertaining stories that show Africans as the multi-faceted and diversely-dynamic people that we are.

In the West, images of Africa are largely negative and frequently substantiate Western stereotypes of the “Continent In Chaos,” and though most of the TV news stories might contain elements of truth, their camera lenses often only point in one direction. African movies point all directions.

The success of Nollywood Movies with Africans in Diaspora is evidence of this. It is consumed worldwide by a starved audience finally getting their serving of film entertainment that’s relevant to their experiences, dreams and hopes. But Africans aren’t the only viewers feasting on these stories, and this often makes me think about the content of this fresh global export. What messages are we sending, artistically and culturally?

If you want to see a Nollywood film, chances are you can get it anywhere. These movies are everywhere; they’re available for purchase online, they’re even in-flight entertainment options on Virgin Atlantic flights. Our contemporary African culture and lifestyle are visible for everyone to see. There’s no denying it, Nollywood is currently Africa’s global Soapbox.

And while, I am ecstatic that we are defining our own image within the global media landscape, I feel a little jaded by the filmatic efforts of many Nollywood producers whose movies duplicate Western movies. A large majority of the romance movies I’ve seen from Nollywood are reflective of this idea. I’ve seen Nollywood romance movies that really have no structure to them whatsoever, except for the fact that the word “love” is thrown so loosely in the course of the narrative, you have no appreciation for what that means within the African context.

Don’t get me wrong there have been some really good yarns that give us insight into the reality of romantic relationships in Nigeria. One notable mention is a film called Just Before the Wedding, which follows the friendship of four young Nigerian men, three of which are bachelors facing the pressures of getting married and starting their families. What’s refreshing about this comedy-drama is its lack of pretentious dialogue. The guys relay a rarely seen male perspective in Nollywood romance movies, while conversing freely about love and sex in pidgin English.

There are quite a few other Nollywood movies that have successfully communicated the idiosyncrasies of the contemporary African without pandering to this notion that an African romantic narrative should be as Western as possible to be successful. I’m not saying that our movies shouldn’t have some common cultural threads within them, only that we should be in our African movies as we are in life – authentic, unapologetic and culturally dynamic.