L.U.N.A. is a 2021 short directed by Blake Vaz and written by Roman Arabia and Mike Bane. Field technician, Lilian Romero, is sent out to diagnose an error from her company’s home assistant device L.U.N.A. Upon her arrival at the house, she finds that things are eerily out of place. The house holds a dark secret that neither she nor the occupants can fathom. Short Film Review: Fatimah Binta Gimsay’s ‘Ijo’ At the heart of L.U.N.A. is a contemporary technological horror married with traditional scares. The artificial assistant has been possessed not by a virus, but by a spiritual…
Author: olamideadio
Read More
By the middle of the 20th century, the German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, had perfected the Epic Theatre movement. It is a theatre technique that avoids illusions by constantly disrupting the audience’s suspension of disbelief. In Brechtian plays, the actor speaks directly to the audience, often analysing the events of the play with them and the elements of illusion like costume changes, make-up, are carried out before the audience. The purpose is to disenchant the audience, have them remain logical, and associate the play with real life as much as possible. Since theatre is the forerunner of cinema, it…
Vaillante is a UNICEF mini-series about the horrors of child-marriage in sub-Saharan Africa. It features new actors (Maguy Essey and Mouna Loueke) from across the continent and was shot by a South African production team. The 3-episode series, written and directed by Tom and James Collins, is available on UNICEF’s YouTube channel. Sali (Maguy Essey) has missed her graduation because she is on an outreach mission in a village to speak with the bereaved mother of a dead child-wife. The thirteen-year-old died giving birth to a baby. Sali has numerous cases of this nature. At her graduation after-party later that…
Fatimah Gimsay—an ambitious multihyphenate—desires to fulfill beautiful storytelling regardless of her role behind the scenes.
Perhaps not. Maybe, as some have rightly hypothesized, we have given the audience far too much credit than deserved. After all, there is no proper yardstick to measure this audience’s intelligence or to prove that it expects anything great of its industry. What we have is an audience that has become comfortable with mediocrity and has accepted it consistently from its filmmakers—from the director to every department involved in the process. When our filmmakers went on that infamous streak of replicating the format of the box office hit film, The Wedding Party 2, directed by Niyi Akinmolayan, the audience defended…
The Girl in the Yellow Jumper is a Ugandan film that follows the bizarre experiences of a hitchhiker, Jim (Michael Wawuyo Jr), given a ride by a police officer, Patrick (Maurice Kirya). Jim was kidnapped and recounts his experiences to the officer on the long ride from the deserted road back to the city. The film is written and directed by Loukman Ali, an eclectic filmmaker, evidenced in the various narrative styles in the film. Related: The 10 Best Nollywood Movies of 2021 The beauty of the story—Uganda’s first film on Netflix, and an ambitious project coming from such a…
Tanwa Savage is a 2021 film written and directed by Geshin Salvador. It stars Uzor Arukwe (Jola), Linda Osifo (Zainab), Bimbo Ademoye (Tosin), and Nkechi Blessing Sunday (Ngozi) as the principal characters. With an improbable premise straight out of classic Nollywood, the film is a dramedy that pushes itself with some admirable chutzpah. Jola and his wife, Zainab, have struggled to have a child. His father, played by Segun Arinze, advises him to have an extramarital affair for a child. Jola, heeding his father’s advice a tad too much, impregnates two women—one of them, Tosin, his wife’s close friend. His…
The Matrix has been rebooted with old characters given new roles, new villains to protect the system, and the old villains suffering the responsibility of deus ex machina. The Matrix Resurrections stars an aging cast in a soft reboot that, paradoxically, lacks the elements that made the old trilogy successful and also has too much of the old trilogy; a lack of restraint here, too much of it elsewhere. Directed by Lana Wachowski, the film has amazing writers in Lana herself, Aleksandar Hemon, and David Mitchell, but it still suffers the Hollywood reboot curse. A perfectly healthy movie franchise has…
It varies; the legend of how Aki (Chinedu Ikedieze) and Pawpaw (Osita Iheme) met. One posits that they met as far back as 1997 at an audition, each shocked at the existence of the other, both certain they were twins from different mothers. Another more recent, more pragmatic account follows that they were both ‘discovered’ by the late veteran Nollywood producer, Chukwuka Emelionwu who, confident he’d discovered a pair of generational talents, hired a scriptwriter to write a script around the duo and then subsequently produced the film, Aki Na Ukwa (2003), promptly placing them into stardom. They would go…
A Naija Christmas is Kunle Afolayan’s latest film in his bumper Netflix deal. With a declamatory title, the film pursues personal ambition and weighs that against what Christmas means in a Nigerian setting. The versatile Kunle Afolayan returns from Swallow with a romantic comedy, something simpler with familiar tropes. Kemi Adesoye, who previously worked with the director on The Figurine and Phone Swap, serves as the screenwriter. Both minds have, here, produced something easily digestible for the family this Christmas. The tropes are familiar and usually, that is a kinder way of calling a work cliché; and while the concept…