The Great Nigerian Films, No. 4: Eyimofe Review

Not-R, 116 m., 2020. Starring Jude Akuwudike, Temi Ami-Williams, Cynthia Ebijie, Sadiq Daba and Kemi Lala Akindoju. Dir. by Arie and Chuko Esiri. Scr. by Chuko. Prod. by Melissa Adeyemo, Arie and Chuko. 

Let's start from the end.

The camera stays stable inside a kiosk yellowing from the glow of a bulb, overlooking an untarred street. A man making a call, a hand pressing the phone to his ear, switches off the bulb, and creaks the kiosk twin doors closed one by one, clicking the lock. Then darkness, which traps the evening daylight within the closed door lines, tracing the doors like a panel light. We hear him walk away and then music comes on. Eddie Okwedy & His Maymores Dance Band sing “Happy Survival.”

This is for me poetry.

Eyimofe or This Is My Desire is an interconnected story of Mofe and Rosa, Lagosians who live in the same vicinity. They do double jobs. Mofe, a middle-ager, is a printing press engineer and a night security guard. Rosa, a young lady hairdresser, doubles as a bartender. Both are low-income earners navigating the daily frustrations of Lagos. But they want to live well. And they want to support their families. So they seek a better life in Europe. The two chapters of the film are named after their countries of choice: Spain for Mofe, Italy for Rosa, who wants to emigrate with her pregnant teenage sister.

The film was marketed as a migration story. This isn't false. But it flattens the story, which at best is that of everyday Lagosians surviving Lagos, a city of chaos and verve. But Chuko knows what we know. He called his script a reverse migration story. It's about the circumstances of wanting to leave home and not an account of the difficult journey abroad or the horrors faced there. He believes such approach humanizes his characters, fills in their inner lives and shows that they, like us, are only desiring one thing: a better life.

Co-directors and twin brothers Chuko and Arie Esiri, natives of Warri but schooled in England and the US, where they bagged MFAs in filmmaking from different schools. Chuko's script, by his admission, is influenced by Charles Dickens' Bleak House and James Joyce's Dubliners. The film itself is influenced by the works of the Taiwanese New Wave filmmaker Edward Yang, who might have inspired the long takes, the wide shots, the cityscape, the fixed camera, the scarce close ups. And the social realism of the New Indian Cinema pioneer Satyajit Ray.

With such background and tastes, they're destined to offend Nollywood freaks. This is their sin. This is Eyimofe’s holy sin. Its “non-Nollywood" aesthetics, which includes but not limited to its excruciatingly slow pace, its understated, unfiltered nostalgic editing, its gritty, verité look, its painterly glosses of colours, pleasurable like the photographs of American Stephen Shores, is. It's a difficult style, a difficult watch, for a typical Nollywood freak, who's been spoilt with the largely unambitious, conventional Nollywood “in-house” styles. 

Pioneering Nigerian film scholar Jonathan Hynes writes of this cultural conservatism. He claims a durable set of   themes and plot types are worked and reworked. I agree. LOL-ish comedy, as a genre or as an element, is typical of many of the highest-grossing Nollywood films. Even novel films find ways to stay conservative. Per Haynes, they vary existing forms and exploit topical material. “The quest for novelty also has commercial motives,” he writes. Take Niyi Akinmolayan's Anthill Studio genre experiments. Day of Destiny (2021) is time travel adventure but also comedy that reworks the Nollywood ritual film genre and features tropes like the comic professor character unique to Nigerian “dance drama.”

This is Eyimofe’s holy sin: being novel and staying novel. The Esiri brothers combine a vastly unexplored subject, surely from a fresh approach, with a “non-Nigerian" filmmaking style. But an excellent film that is a difficult watch for a typical Nollywood freak is still excellent.

And Eyimofe is truly excellent. I love how ordinary stuff of life is distilled into poetry. Take the end for one. And take how the camera stills and settles on a character even when someone else is speaking, writing on their face what's on their mind – and more. Even the NEPA situation is written into a little poem by the glare of the camera. Beyond the grand scheme of things these minute moments of magic are what we look for in a work of art. But the film also delivers on the grand scheme of things. The Esiri brothers have captured the engine that keeps Nigerians moving: will. The will to be, the will to live, the will to love, the will to laugh, the will to breathe. They've captured what moves Nigerians into kindness, into communal love, into putting family first. They’ve rightly balanced optimism against pessimism, finding within so tiny a space that stubborn, slippery hope that defies bad omen, that shakes bad fate until it empties out like a sachet of dry milk. They have also breathed life into Lagos, making the city a character unto itself, sketching, so correctly, so truthfully, the skin of this miracle of a place so that what we see isn't a picture but the real thing. And may the street never forget the acting put up by Jude (Mofe) and Temi (Rosa). Their calculated portrayal of that Nigerian survival instinct is true without being difficult, fluent without being clumsy. They demonstrate a symbol of hope in spite of frustrations and resignation. 

This film is an act of testimony.

The Great Nigerian Films (TGNF) are a collection of my favourite Nigerian movies. My criterion is the quality of a film. But I'm likely to pick a so-so film that is vital to film development and studies in the country. These films are a primer and a companion to Nollywood. And this is a work of documenting and archiving.