Consisting of AS Elijah, Akinmuyiwa Bisola, Edukpo Tina, James Tayler, Mathew Cerf, Okechukwu Samuel and Ogungbamila Temitope, the Nigerian-based Agbajowo Collective recently world-premiered its first fiction feature, The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Akinmuyiwa Bisola, Okechuk…
ficha de la película], in Toronto’s Centrepiece strand, calling attention to the forced evictions of Lagos’ Otodo Gbame informal settlement. The name of the collective, drawn from a Yoruba proverb, refers to a sense of collective responsibility in creating change. Cineuropa spoke with four members of the collective about their social thriller.

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Cineuropa: The film, right down to who produced it, embodies a ground-up, grassroots perspective. What drew you to a fictional story, rather than a telling of this struggle from a documentary perspective?
Akinmuyiwa Bisola: We just want people to know our struggle and to support our advocacy. We’ve been trying different ways of thought processing and have been embarking on documentaries around the evictions and the other struggles that our communities are facing. But we feel that is not enough. We are looking for the best way to actually tell people our stories, along with the challenges and struggles.

Okechukwu Samuel: One of the things we did before was documentaries – telling these stories in a shorter form and also with pictures. But then, as Bisola said, those kinds of documentaries do not fully tell the story as much as possible. With a fiction feature, and even using some of our characters who actually live the life in the evicted community, this gave us enough time to make it something that people could actually connect with better.

Mathew Cerf: In a Nigerian context, documentaries don’t gain much traction among the media-consuming public, and we wanted to package an advocacy message into a film that would entertain first and, through entertainment, could create a broader sector of advocacy and allies than if we had just put out more issue-focused documentaries. The entertainment factor is key in bridging different social, economic and geographical sectors, and bringing them into the fray, so to speak.

There are many different forms of collaborative filmmaking. What does your collective’s process look like?
James Tayler: I would maybe reflect back on a Sundance Stories of Change Lab, a workshop that we went to that was part of the origin of the film. We had some really fantastic mentors. One of them was Kat Cizek, who co-created the Co-Creation Manifesto. With urban issues and advocacy, it’s not about a top-down model; it’s about a grassroots mobilisation model. So, I think that manifesto was really quite a foundational reference point – the idea of giving equal weight to professional experience and lived experience, especially with story writing and coming up with ideas. We didn’t choose the easy route, and it made the process much richer. We did tussle, but we had a really strong interpersonal connection at the root of it all. For me, that’s what really made the struggle worthwhile.

AB: The reason why we actually call ourselves Agbajowo is because we all have the same motive and the same goals to work towards. I think an individual has to put their selfish interests aside to focus on the beautiful goal that we aim to achieve. This makes it easier for us to be able to make a concrete decision. We just have to say, “This is how I see this in my community,” and everybody brings their own opinions to the table of discussion. We prioritise what can actually beautify our story, what can make it more efficient, and what can enable us to achieve all of our goals.

OS: In many of our communities, we’ve been going there to tell stories already, so we are familiar with almost everybody in that setup. Then, we use key people in the movement as a point of contact to mobilise most of our communities together. This is the way we are able to bring them on board.

Many of the cast and crew members were also drawn from local communities. What did this recruitment, casting and collaborative production process look like?
AB: We are part of a movement called the Nigeria Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, a movement of the urban poor [to champion] their dignity and development. At the international level, we are known as Slum Dwellers International. We usually have our federation meetings twice a month, where all of the community service members come to discuss our community problems and issues. It's actually easier for us to get ourselves together this way because we have a platform from where the community can take the information back home.

MC: The model we tried to use was bringing people with lived experience from these communities into both the cast and crew – anywhere possible. From a cast perspective, we were building up a model rooted in the idea of co-creation but also based on films like City of God that had used a similar model and, in doing so, had achieved a pretty unique form of realism, which is part of why it resonated so well with people. What I think allowed us to have a crew that was made up almost entirely of people from communities we were working in was a really strong mentorship model, where every department had someone who was more an industry professional. Our pre-production period was a lot longer than normal because training was a huge part of it. On the camera side, we brought in a DoP, Leo Purman, who worked with Sam [Okechukwu Samuel] and Temi [Ogungbamila Temitope] on really bringing them into the world of his feature-film industry perspective. For every department, we brought in select professionals that were vetted on the basis of their willingness to participate in a collaboratory way, which people aren't used to.