The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos.

Read Time:3 Minute, 47 Second

Synopsis: Jawu, a young mother from a waterfront slum in Lagos, stumbles upon a horde of corrupt blood money marked for a real estate development that threatens her home. Overcoming isolation and temptation, she must stand as a unifying force in a community that stands to lose everything.

In November 2016, people living in Otodo-Gbame, a fishing shantytown on Nigeria’s Lagos coastline, saw their community partially destroyed by fire. Attempts to get the police to stop the destruction were futile, according to an Amnesty International report. Instead of helping, “the police and a demolition team returned overnight with a bulldozer”.

Much of the blame fell on the Lagos state government, which had publicized plans to remove waterside slums around the city. Still, the government denied responsibility for demolishing the shantytown, even as it noted that it would “prefer to have better development, befitting of a prime area in a mega city” on the land occupied by the community. Continue Reading

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

Q: 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?
A: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.

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

Q: What was your experience working as a collective?
A: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.