What follows is a recount of my experiences while filming God’s Own Country in Nigeria.
October 21st, 2005:
10am
Heard the phone ring. I like to answer the phone on the 1st ring, but that day I was tired, so I answered on the 2nd 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
