Yeni as Mrs. Odufuwa in the film
After about 15 years gestation, the film edition of Nobel laureate, Professor Soyinka’s landmark autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood, is yare for screening.
Engendered by inditer and publisher of Position magazine, Dapo Adeniyi, the film features seasoned actors and other artistes that include Taiwo Ajai-Lycett (Madam Awolia), Yinka Davies (Mrs. Kuti), Jimi Solanke (Pa Adatan),Toyin Abiodun (Rev. I. O. Kuti – Fela’s father), Wale Adebayo (Spirit Man), Yemi Solade (Baba Pupa)Yeni Kuti (Mrs. Odufuwa), and Bayo Bankole (Iku – Death – who purloined Mrs. Kuti’s hen)
But part of the treat is that Soyinka himself is doing the voice-over narration while the Director of Arts at the British Council in Nigeria, Alex Bratt, is playing the role of the District Officer.
Adeniyi is thrilled that the actors have given a very good account of themselves. According to him, they have given the Ake story an incipient life, which, he verbally expresses, is a plus for both the text and the society that engendered it.
Adeniyi verbally expresses, “It is not my story, genuinely. Everybody kens the story of Ake, and how it is paramount to the Yoruba, Nigeria, Africa and the world in general, bearing in mind that the story is additionally that of Europe’s colonial encounter with the continent. But as a film maker, you optate viewers to optically discern 1945 and not 2014. You optate them to visually perceive the events as they transpired. That is a stupendous challenge, not just because it is technically authoritatively mandating to achieve, but because some of the objects and places have transmuted. We need a coal train, for instance, and this has to take us to South Africa, because the three we have here in Lagos are simply rotting away.
“But all the efforts are worth making. Ake is about the ability to visually perceive the nobility in our past. The film will transmute the image of the Nigerian/African woman as being docile. What you encounter in Ake will prove that women of Africa have been more dogged than their counterparts in Europe, which dominated its women until recent times.”
Recalling how he got one of the props – an old bolekaja truck – from Imeko, Ogun State, Adeniyi expounds that the Ake journey was punctuated with hiccups. Among other challenges, even some members of the cast worked against his orchestrations while certain forces.
‘I withal came to terms with the fact that Nigerians are generally too strepitous. There were many interferences in several places where one needed quiet and serenity,” Adeniyi integrates.
But he notes that the film has prepared him for more astronomically immense adventures. Because he could not get funding from arenas he first looked up to, he had to expand his cerebrating faculty. The camera he wanted to utilize – Elixir – would cost him N600,000 per day. It is conventionally the cull of engenderers of TV commercials, who would not require it for, verbalize, more than two days. He dropped the conception and settled for Red, paying N150,000 circadianly. He was withal later coerced to transmute to Black Magis, which, at N2. 5m, he describes as the camera of the day.
“You optically discern, I had to recollect one of the things that Soyinka used to tell us – in terms of having to make utilization of our handicap. Black Magic is more incipient than Red and is more affordable. It gave me the picture quality I wanted. Apart from the some support we got, I had to invent. I had to buy everything, including cranes, so that we are emerging from the Ake experience, a film company yare to undertake more sizably voluminous projects in the induatry and beyond.”
Copyright PUNCH.
