Nigerian-Canadian filmmaker has CAA Media Finance shopping his revenge drama at TIFF as part of the Industry Selects market.
The film, with a script 12 years in the making and shot in Canada and Nigeria, marks a triumph for Nzekwe, who like fellow black Canadian filmmakers long had his work neglected, ignored or dismissed before a Canadian industry reckoning after the murder of George Floyd finally diverted meaningful local financing to underrepresented creators.
“These stories that we thought weren’t interesting, or there was no audience, now people are gravitating towards them because we are making these stories. This movie is about immigration, this is transnational cinema,” Nzekwe toldat Bell Lightbox, where he basked in the presence of smartly-dressed international buyers smiling and shaking his hand as they filed into Cinema 7 to view his third movie afterBetter late than never, he added: “We are finally making our own stories, where before we waited for the gatekeepers to make these stories and they never allowed us to tell them.”follows Orah Maduka, an illegal immigrant and female taxi driver in Toronto played by Oladejo, who seeks revenge for the death of her son who is brutally murdered by a high-profile Nigerian criminal in a drug trafficking and money laundering operation turned violent.Nzekwe explained a movie script that at first was to center around family bonds torn apart by a money-laundering operation eventually became a revenge drama when in real life his brother was murdered in 2016 by a stray bullet fired by a corrupt police officer with the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Nigeria. “That’s when the revenge angle became more intense. I had to travel to Nigeria to get to the root of how my brother was killed. That’s when the rage I had inside, and the pain I saw on my mother’s face, led to revenge thoughts, to getting my pound of flesh, and I realized the only way to deal with that was to channel it through a film, and I poured everything into my script,” he recounted.is a product of what the Canadian film industry chooses to support or not, and which creators it backs at any one time. After years in the wilderness, his Africa-inspired revenge drama is also part of a new wave of indie films about immigrant life in Canada, and with universal themes for global audiences and streaming platforms, like Antony Shim’s
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