At the Toronto International Film Festival, Two Films Explore the Darker Corners of Lagos

If any of these scenarios feel familiar, it is because they are versions of headlines that have come out of Lagos, Nigeria’s sprawling economic nerve center and former capital. They are also the bare-bones plot summaries of the two Nigerian feature entries at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) running from September 5 to 15.

'Freedom Way'

Freedom Way, directed by Afolabi Olalekan is a stark drama that encapsulates, in about 88 minutes, what it means to be young and existing in today’s Lagos; the hopes, excitement, frustrations, despair and eventual resignation. There is nothing pretty about this way of living and Freedom Way, which plays in the festival’s Discovery section has no interest in glamourizing or excusing the utter dysfunction of the Nigerian state.

The film takes the story of two young start-up entrepreneurs, Tayo (Jable Ogranya) and Themba (Jesse Suntele), as its entry point. It then goes on to spin a circular narrative that connects the fates of a host of other characters even if tangentially, painting a sobering but genuine portrait of how everyone, regardless of station, is diminished by the corruption of the political class. Not willing to let anyone off the hook, Freedom Way — set in a Lagos Island neighborhood that gives the film its title — also highlights how personal weaknesses contribute to creating this unliveable status quo.

Writer and producer Blessing Uzzi says the integrity of her fictional story was inspired partly by recent headlines, but for structure, she looked to Crash, the Oscar-winning 2004 drama about race relations in Los Angeles, and more recently, Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Emmy-winning limited series When They See Us, which fictionalized a ripped-from-the-headlines saga of extreme miscarriage of justice. She tells OkayAfrica, “But I also wanted to tell a completely Nigerian story such that everyone can relate to it instantly and I found the perfect partner in Afolabi [Olalekan].”

On his part, Olalekan, who has a background in music videos, says that just like any young Nigerian, he has his own police brutality experience and so could relate to the story. “I wasn’t looking to make a film about police or migration (japa) as my first feature, but once Blessing shared the story, I connected to it and we developed it together from there.”

'The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos'

Collaboration of a vastly different kind powers the adventure yarn, The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos. Credited to a group of seven local and international filmmakers (five Nigerians and two foreigners) who go by the title, The Agbajowo Collective, the film is a sprawling experiment that does not always work. Beautifully shot, the collective employs magical realism, conjoined with a more didactic approach to their socio-political concerns.

This is a film that wears its agenda proudly even if this leads to frustrating choices and head-scratching outcomes that betray the naivety of the collective’s storytelling skills.

The Legend of the Vagabond Queen is inspired by the 2016 forceful eviction of residents of Otodo-Gbame, a waterside slum community in Lagos composed mostly of fishermen and women. The film is the product of a filmmaking and journalism workshop supported by three non-profits — Slum Dwellers Initiative, Justice and Empowerment Initiatives and the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation — and targeted at young people from Otodo-Gbame and similar slum communities.

For Bisola Akinmuyiwa, one of the founding members of the collective, her interest in joining the team stemmed from frustrations of getting mainstream media to cover stories from her community properly. “No one wanted to tell our story in the ways that presented us as real, complex and full human beings. There was always a spin that criminal elements were living in the communities and so the evictions were justified. I hope this film can help to correct that impression,” she tells OkayAfrica.

For residents of Lagos, the most populous city in the country and home to about 20 million

In 2020, young people fed up with the endemic challenge of targeted police brutality came out to the streets en masse to protest, but even that ended in tragedy when government officials at both federal and state levels sent armed soldiers to shoot at the unarmed protesters. This helped power a renewed and ongoing wave of immigration that has young people flocking to Europe, the Americas — and everywhere else frankly — in search of opportunities.

The city of Toronto, in first-world Canada, might seem like an unlikely place to foreground the concerns of poverty, displacement and police brutality in Lagos but such is the power of cinema to connect global communities. Toronto is also home to a diverse community of immigrants and the public-facing nature of the festival ensures that all kinds of people can come to these films identifying with the characters and situations on screen. “I was struck by how similar Lagos is to the situation in Iran. It is different but in some ways, very similar,” Farhad, a Canadian moviegoer whose family is Persian, shares with OkayAfrica following the world premiere of Freedom Way.

After finding a welcoming audience in Toronto, it remains to be seen how these films will be received when- or if- they play at home. Blessing Uzzi says, she is trying to live in the moment and taking it step by step, “I guess we will see when the time comes.”