The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos Director Q & A

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The ﬁlm is inspired by the forced evictions and destruction of the ﬁshing community of Otodo Gbame in 2017. Can you speak about your connection to this event and how it inspired you to make this ﬁlm?

Two members of our collective are from Otodo Gbame, and lost their homes in that eviction. The aftermath of that eviction – the mass-displacement, the judicial injunctions that were ignored, the court cases that didn’t go anywhere, the destruction of families, livelihoods, community – is what gave birth to this ﬁlm. The journalists stopped writing about it, and we knew that if not us, nobody would tell our story, and the world would forget about Otodo Gbame. But our ﬁlm is bigger than this story, and Otodo Gbame’s story is bigger than its 30,000 displaced. It represents a continuation of a cycle – a decades-long pattern of forced eviction and criminalization of urban poor livelihoods in Lagos that continues to this day. These are the voices that we sought to channel in the making of the ﬁlm.

What challenges did you face as young and ﬁrst-time ﬁlmmakers, many of whom were from informal settlements?

When we began this project, we knew we had a unique opportunity to create something special before we had written a page. We lived within communities overﬂowing with a beauty that we had never seen reﬂected on a screen, and knew that if we could capture our environment in an authentic way, we would create something the world had never seen. But translating that into a feature ﬁlm, in all of its creative and technical demands, required years of learning, and a team of creative partners throughout the production process who brought technical & creative skill sets that allowed our ideas to ﬂourish. Everything was new. So every phase took time – to learn the established tools, techniques, principles, then to revise them to ﬁt our team, environment, and unique production methods.

But what was a weakness, also was a strength. Our entire crew – from wardrobe, to continuity, to grip, to sound – were also from informal settlements across Lagos, learning ﬁlm production for the ﬁrst time. We were nimble, adaptable, and nobody took themselves too seriously. We could move through and shoot in environments that most productions would struggle with because they were our homes, and we knew how our characters would react to a situation, because we had lived it.

What was your experience working as a collective?

There is a reason why most ﬁlms are made through a single individual’s creative lens. In many ways, it is the route of least resistance. Co-creation is messy. It is chaotic. It is non-linear. It takes time. It took us years, living together, moving together, observing together, to coalesce around a shared vision. Co-creation is slow, until it’s not. When a collective of diverse creative perspectives synchronize around a shared narrative goal, the pages begin to write themselves, and are enriched by the variety of perspectives that must coalesce to create a single voice. While working as a collective required building new blueprints for creativity and ﬁlm production, we drew inspiration from ﬁlm movements of past and present that center around the collective, such as the Third Cinema movement from the 1960s in Latin America, and the ongoing work of MIT’s Co-Creation Studio.

You worked with multiple housing rights organizations to produce the ﬁlm. How did it come together, and how did your communities help?

The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos is not a stand-alone ﬁlm. It is part of an ongoing, multi-pronged, decades long campaign by Justice & Empowerment Initiatives (JEI), Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and the Nigerian Slum / Informal Settlement Federation to end forced evictions of the urban poor and build inclusive and resilient cities, in partnership with organized urban poor communities across 36 countries. In Lagos, JEI and the Federation are connected with grassroots advocacy networks across dozens of communities, and these networks were the backbone of the ﬁlm, from being the source material for building characters, to allowing our team to ﬁlm in environments that would be off limits to other large-scale productions, to making up the majority of the ﬁlm’s cast & crew. Beyond being the bedrock of our ﬁlm, the broader movement provided a wellspring of momentum & inspiration to draw on throughout the many uphill battles we faced over the years in bringing this ﬁlm to life.

You write about the ﬁlm as part of a larger strategy for housing rights and urban resilience in Lagos. This includes a grassroots distribution campaign in informal communities and targeted screenings for policymakers. Can you tell us more about how you will use the ﬁlm as a tool for your activism?

In LVQ, we wanted to make a ﬁlm that would entertain, while showing the world the teeth behind anti-poor policies in Lagos. We also wanted to allow audiences to connect with the humanity of those who were victims of those policies, and offer a hope among urban poor communities that, when united, resistance is possible. These priorities frame our distribution strategy. We want the ﬁlm to reach global audiences in order to draw the attention of policymakers & thought leaders, but more crucially, we aim to distribute the ﬁlm throughout informal settlements in Lagos and megacities across the continent.

Beyond drawing attention to forced eviction and anti-poor policies, we want the ﬁlm to inspire the next generation of ﬁlmmakers from informal settlements who want to create stories to reframe the narrative around their communities. The popular media often show these communities as dens of criminals, or health hazards, and these characterizations can serve as a pretext for forced eviction. There is a saying from Otodo Gbame that is repeated in our ﬁlm: “Pli pli toleton, mije kpo godo tolonayo” – “unity is our strength”. We want this message to reverberate across audiences, to and inspire future ﬁlmmakers from urban-poor communities to take their stories to the global stage.

How did Nigerian storytelling and folklore inﬂuence how you wanted to tell this story of displacement and resistance?

In our story, we wanted to be authentic, and as inspiration, we drew from a vein of social realist ﬁlms that found beauty and a deeper truth through the faithful recreation of reality – in all of its harshness, complexity, and vibrance. But in Lagos, especially in the stories we were telling, magical realism is social realism. To authentically reproduce lived experience, spirituality and folklore must be interwoven with the day-to-day. Our ﬁlm also uses folklore to connect Jawu, our main character, to a broader history of resistance among her people. When presented alongside her relationship with her son, we wanted her encounter with the spirit of Egbaezen to remind her (and audiences) that her (their) struggle today is rooted in a broader struggle that connects the past, present, and future.

Can you tell us about your casting process? Ami-Williams and Mr. Macaroni (Debo Adedayo) in particular are big stars in Nigeria, how did you approach them to be part of the ﬁlm?

When approaching our casting for the ﬁlm, we were inspired by the method used in City of God (2002). They cast a small group of actors from established networks in Brazil, and the remainder of the ﬁlm’s cast came from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, who they trained for screen acting through extensive workshops. We adopted a similar technique. Apart from a handful of actors, including Temi and Debo, we found our cast through dozens of auditions held across informal settlements in Lagos.

While this method made for many authentic performances and a deeper level of realism in many of our scenes, the ﬁlm is carried to new heights by Temi Ami-Williams’ performance as Jawu. The dedication she gave to the role, and the emotion she brought to her character were a privilege to watch unfold. Debo Adedayo as Abisoro also brings to his character a signature charisma, while breathing moments of nuance that creates windows to empathize with a character for whom empathy can be difﬁcult to ﬁnd. We were able to reach Temi and Debo through our co-producer and Nollywood veteran, Chioma Onyenwe. Beyond being compelled by the ﬁlm’s advocacy objectives, both were excited to be given roles that would challenge them in new ways.