Tag: Black Female Filmmakers

Five Female Directors Who Helped Shape Nollywood

Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, has overtaken Hollywood in terms of its volume of output, and is now second only to Bollywood. What were once dismissed as stilted, static, and amateurish films made on home video, have now developed into their own distinctive visual style and genres, which are popular and influential across Africa and the African diaspora worldwide.

Amaka-Igwe
Amaka Igwe (1963 – 2014)

 

Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, has overtaken Hollywood in terms of its volume of output, and is now second only to Bollywood. What were once dismissed as stilted, static, and amateurish films made on home video, have now developed into their own distinctive visual style and genres, which are popular and influential across Africa and the African diaspora worldwide. One of the visionaries who helped to shape the Nollywood phenomenon, Amaka Igwe ran her own production company and owned a radio station, as well as writing and directing films such as Rattle Snake and Violated, and their sequels, having debuted as writer and producer of the award-winning TV soap Checkmate. Her work with Amaka Igwe Studios is credited with raising standards in the Nollywood industry as a whole. Using the Igbo language, Igwe’s films were aimed squarely at a national audience, allowing people to see their own everyday lives and conflicts mirrored in her works.

Tope Oshin Ogun

 

“My films, I mean the ones that are my personal projects, have serious themes and deal with the situations and problems in our society today. I am not all for entertainment for entertainment’s sake” – Tope Oshin Ogun

Now the CEO of Sunbow Productions Ltd., the actress Tope Oshin Ogun credits Amaka Igwe for getting her into directing and inspiring her to think that she could take a broader control of her films. Igwe noticed that Ogun was asking intelligent questions about all aspects of production and told her that she had a director’s brain. Amaka Igwe’s legacy thus continues in the films of Tope Oshin Ogun, demonstrating the importance of mentoring and precedent between women in the industry. After she decided to take this direction, a number of the directors that she had worked with as an actress allowed her to intern for them, watching them at work while she prepared to make the transition herself. Ogun began by directing many episodes of the television soap opera Tinsel, which is popular across Africa. Tope Oshin Ogun’s feature film Journey to Self chronicles the bonding journey of four women, tackling personal details and reaching self-realization. Filmed from a female perspective, the four women leads are staying at the home of a deceased friend and reading her insightful letters, triggering their own journeys of self-discovery. An intense story of female friendship, empowerment, sacrifice, and self-respect, Journey to Self illustrates Tope Oshin Ogun’s commitment to telling women’s stories that have meaning for her audience.

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Sandra Mbanefo Obiago

 

“I’m concerned about the fact that we download a lot about ourselves yet upload very little into mainstream media, no matter which media we are talking about”, – Sandra Mbanefo Obiago

Concerned about African women’s authorship of their own image, Sandra Mbanefo Obiago founded Communicating for Change (CFC) in 1998 with the mission of becoming a content provider for positive films documenting social challenges in ways that have a strong human interest and creative angle to engage the viewer. She points to Hollywood films like Blood Diamond with its diamond trafficking storyline, as having greater global impact in raising awareness than dry documentaries, while the popular South African series Soul City was able to reach more viewers with carefully researched HIV/AIDS storylines than the “awareness” films of NGOs.  Recently, Obiago has taken her long-standing interest in visual art to found African Art Spectrum, and believes that closer collaboration between Nigeria’s writers, musicians, visual artists, photographers and filmmakers will be key to developing the artistic level of Nollywood film. In For Love of Indigo, Obiago celebrates the traditional Yoruba indigo textile artform of adire, through the figure of the internationally famed artist Nike Okundaye. Nike’s life story begins with hardships faced by many rural women, before rising to an extraordinary level of both individual success and generosity in giving back to the community. Among the many women that she mentored in adire were Nigerian emigrants to Italy, who had fallen into the sex industry from a lack of other money-making options, and who were able to use the craft as an alternative source of income.

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Watch Sandra Mbanefo Obiago’s films on culture unplugged.

 

 Remi Vaughan-Richards

 

“The rest of the world documents… why do you think we have museums everywhere in the world? Because it’s important” – Remi Vaughan-Richards

 

Remi Vaughan-Richards is the Creative Director of Singing Tree Films, “a hub of creative minds with a mission to entertain, inform and educate using behavior change communication methods.” Based in Nigeria, the company provides content for diverse clients, including the BBC World Service Trust’s Nigeria branch, Sandra Mbanefo Obiago’s Communicating for Change and Ondo State Government. She is interested in defining Nigerian modernity that is rooted in history, and reimagines issues in a new light, integrating her Western training with her Nigerian culture. For examples, in Scent of the Street, a documentary exploring “area girls” from rougher neighbourhoods or “areas” of the capital city Lagos, the subjects Bisayo, Onyinye and Gift are given space to speak for themselves and define their own ambitions. Though she currently lives off dates, Onyinye is clear about her family loyalties and sense of responsibility as a provider for younger siblings, as well as ambition as a model and fashion designer. Bisayo’s role as “Area Mother” is highlighted for the diplomatic and leadership qualities that her hustle requires. Gift’s more modest ambitions for her own market stall, and for safety walking home at night, accepting the protection of her “fine” boyfriend, are equally honored. Scent of the Street reclaims the role of women in hustling street life from an ornamental role on the margins, to put it center stage. Finally, a partnership with Obiago’s Communicating for Change allowed all three of the documentary’s subjects to enroll in life skill classes, to help transform their outlook and the opportunities available to them.

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Watch Scent of the Street on vimeo.

 

 Michelle Bello

 

“I love romantic comedies, you know, I’m a romantic at heart, so I was just like, ‘this will be fun to do’ “ – Michelle Bello

A film director and producer, Michelle Bello is the CEO of Nigerian-based film company Blu Star Entertainment Ltd.. After studying communications at the American University in Washington D.C., Bello made her first 16mm short, Sheltered, during a study-abroad program in Prague. After graduation she moved home to Nigeria, becoming an Associate Producer on Mo Abudu’s hit MNet TV Show Moments with Mo, then produced the award-winning music video for T.Y. Bello’s “Greenland.” In 2008, she completed her first feature film, Small Boy, which was nominated for two awards at the Los Angeles American Black Film Festival and won two African Movie Academy Awards in 2009 for its art direction and child star. A film about a young boy living on the streets of Lagos after fleeing abuse at home, it offered a true-to-life portrait of a child in crisis. In a complete change of tone, her next feature, 2013’s Flower Girl, was an escapist romantic comedy in which a shy florist teams up with a movie star to press her long-term boyfriend into proposing. As Africa can be stereotyped as a crisis zone or exotic backdrop, it is important to see films like Bello’s that celebrate universal human aspirations to love and laughter. Flower Girl became a number one box office hit in Nigeria and Ghana, before receiving a limited U.K. theatrical release, making Bello the first female director to have an international cinematic release, a core part of a new wave of Nollywood directors that are furthering the industry as global players. Together with the other women on this list, Michelle Bello seems to promise a strong female voice in African cinema going forward.

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Brigit McCone believes globalization ought to flow both ways. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and researching overlooked female artists.

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture.

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This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Last year was a stellar one for Black women filmmakers. First, there was Amma Asante’s exquisitely filmed Belle (starring an impressive Gugu Mbatha-Raw), followed later by Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotionally layered Beyond the Lights (also starring Mbatha-Raw). The year finally closed out with Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed historical drama, Selma.

However, while Belle was summarily dismissed by movie critics as a “black Jane Austen drama,” and Beyond the Lights received more favorable reviews but was nonetheless ignored at the box office, DuVernay has a real shot at becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar (having already made history with her nomination at the Golden Globes). Of course, there is something to be said for women receiving critical acclaim when the films they direct focus on the lives of men, but that’s another story. Nonetheless, the acclaim she has received is absolutely earned.

(Editor’s note: DuVernay was not nominated.)

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Selma is a rather subversive take on historical events: part sweeping epic drama, part intimate and domestic storytelling in its rendering of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 (led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and played in the film with an understated grace by David Oyelowo). DuVernay imbues this Civil Rights-era film with a black woman’s sensibility, which makes the storytelling all the richer.

There is the opening shot, featuring King practicing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, before he is joined by his wife Coretta (played by Carmen Ejogo in an uncanny resemblance to the late icon) fixing his tie. Here, an international milestone is seamlessly intertwined with the space of domestic intimacy, just as the following scene depicting the four girls in Birmingham decked out in their finest Sunday best—as they gossip about how Coretta Scott King does her hair while descending into a church basement—resonates on the most mundane level. Although we have the benefit of history, it is still jarring when the bomb explodes, and, as occurs throughout the film, each death is doled out in slow motion, the camera (aesthetically positioned by the accomplished cinematographer Bradford Young to capture the brilliance of dark skin) refusing to turn our collective eyes away from the bloodshed and the casualties of “racial progress.”

mlk-lbj

 

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture. Because of the rewrite, we not only get a redirection on King and how his Southern Christian Leadership Conference group came into conflict with the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but women are also added to the picture, including movement participants like Freedom Rider Diane Nash (played by Tessa Thompson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Touissant) and Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). They are still marginal to the main story, but at least they are visible and part of the grassroots movement critical to King’s leadership.

church-girls

 

We also see certain feminist approaches: from how the movement men can descend onto a woman’s home and make themselves quite comfortable as their very masculine dominance takes over her kitchen space (a subtle critique of the ways progressive men constantly rely on and exploit women’s labor, all wrapped up in the warmth of black Southern domestic comfort) to a scene featuring Amelia Boynton and Coretta Scott King discussing the struggles of activism and the challenge of maintaining hope (a scene Touissant has noted was DuVernay’s own conscious attempts at passing the Bechdel Test by including a scene where women are not talking about men). Through Coretta’s story, DuVernay also highlights how the iconic hero that we celebrate through King does not translate to admirable husband and father. King’s infidelities, however, are included not to tarnish his image but to undergird the real difficulties of committing to both a political movement and the personal sphere. King’s political involvement (including long stays away from home) also brings the constant fear of death, a fear Coretta quietly yet persistently underscores throughout her scenes.

More than anything, Selma is what we get when we intersect the personal with the political, the epic with the intimate, the historical with the present day (e.g. because King’s speeches were off limits, what we also get in the film are double entendres of what the Selma movement meant for 1965 and what present-day struggles mean for us here in 2015).

selma-march

 

While the film’s budget is tiny by Hollywood standards ($20 million), what DuVernay does with the film is a real triumph in not only quality filmmaking but in accomplished storytelling, where black people and their allies stand in all their brilliant humanity and where women’s stories hold equal weight against the heavyweight often accorded men’s histories. Let us hope her triumphs will open the doors wider for other women filmmakers.

Of course we may find solace on smaller screens, where diversity reigns and where Shonda Rhimes dominates Thursday television with her Black women leads and multiracial casting. Nonetheless, there is a power that is felt when viewing images in a much larger medium with its expansive and colossal screen and booming soundtrack. DuVernay has shown why Black women still matter on big screens and why they matter more so behind the camera.

 

Janell Hobson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, and a frequent contributor to Ms.