Arie and Chuko Esiri’s debut feature Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) is a bold, superbly directed diptych of two Nigerians planning to emigrate from Lagos. Aside from a delicate and nuanced attention to colour and composition, the film is guided by the excellent performances of Jude Akuwudike and Temi Ami-Williams, its two very loosely connected leads.
A few days after its London Film Festival premiere, and after I had already given it a glowing review, the brothers kindly lent me their time to speak about this melancholic, expansive work.
Joseph Bullock: Hello Chuko and Arie. This was one of my favourite films from the London Film Festival this year. The name, This is My Desire… is it a direct translation? Because I feel like Eyimofe is quite a short title to be translated to that.
CHUKO ESIRI: Yeah it means ‘this is what I want,’ or ‘this is my desire.’ So it’s quite literal yeah.
JB: Ok. And the film is split into two distinct sections: Spain and Italy. Can you tell me about this choice? Because it’s a very definitive structuring of the film but also one that is undercut slightly.
CHUKO: Well, the title choices were the two most popular destinations for illegal migrants. I think literally today a thousand migrants from Africa landed on the Canary Islands. So it was telegraphing this want of where they’re going to, or the specific places they want to go to.
JB: The fact that it’s about desire means that the film is structured around a sense of isolation and displacement, despite the fact that, unlike many migration stories, we don’t see these characters become lost in these new places.
CHUKO and ARIE: Absolutely.
JB: It’s never didactic in any way, and it’s a very subtle evocation of this melancholy that the characters experience. Can you talk about how you set about filming Lagos and these people within it?
ARIE: Yeah. I think for the most part a lot of what you see on-screen existed in the script. All of the locations were there. The piece moves throughout the city considerably. For us, with regards to staging it, we wished to do it in a way that allowed Lagos to take part in this story as our third protagonist. It was really to let life continue behind the drama of the scene or whatever it was we wanted to capture. Some of the places we went to, like the markets, we would shoot from a long distance on a telephoto lens and have our actors meander through it and interact with people. So that was very improvisational.
And the rest of it – you know, people shaving in the background, or selling bread – those were all things that were taking place in real life whilst our characters were on whatever point in their journey they were at. That’s how we went about making it feel more quotidian than anything else.
JB: There’s this aspect of realism to the movie but there’s also this heightened sense of colour. It’s shot on film, and there’s moments where you have things like electrical wires that are popping out of the frame, or when Mofe looks at coffins for his family. There are elements that feel in opposition to a realism, things I would associate with certain art-house directors.
CHUKO: Sort of like a heightened realism? Or like a manufactured realism?
JB: Yes. It’s not a documentary approach, even though it’s taking representations from reality.
CHUKO: Absolutely. We were very heavily influenced by New Taiwanese cinema – especially the work of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien – and what those films… what I think they do so spectacularly – the way they are composed, the rhythms, and the way they frame their locations – after a while it frees the viewer to be involved with the characters. It kind of desensitises you to the alien or the foreign nature of the place you’re in. That is Nigeria; it’s just colours. Even our crows aren’t black. We wanted that to be present.
I mean it’s going to be anyway once you put the camera in certain places. But in costume design as well, it was about bringing those textures forward. Or having the audience feel embedded in this place without that documentary aspect.
JB: Do you think that this patience that you have with the camera and this sense of place permits some of the more dour and melancholic elements of the film? There’s a great attention to off-screen space and to how these interactions still have an interior nature to them.
ARIE: Such as the deaths?
JB: There’s a scene with Rosa’s new boyfriend and his friends looking down upon the city. The displacement that she feels amongst this group is observed exactly, but there’s a sense of something else. I guess I’m asking what kind of closeness do you have to your characters and when are you trying to distance yourselves from them?
ARIE: With the example of Rosa. Temi Ami-Williams, who plays her, was a true collaborator in shaping that narrative. A lot of what she’s going through are things that she understands through friends and from being a young Nigerian woman living in Lagos. She was a student at the time actually, and graduated from University while we were shooting. So I think there is an intimacy that a lot of the actors have with their characters.
But we were always straddling that line of shooting in an objective manner, yet knowing when to make things more subjective, if that makes sense. We are seeing some of their most intimate moments at a relative distance. Part of it was to avoid being didactic, or making the audience look in a particular direction. I think that there are two real close-ups in the whole film – everything else is medium or wide. Yet the writing is intimate. The idea was that you were a bit of a fly on the wall in these very dear and important parts of people’s lives.
CHUKO: I think that your point about how we’re watching her but there’s a sense of something else happening… it was also to keep Lagos truly present as a third character. The idea is that what you’re watching is being repeated in the next room, off camera, somewhere further along in the city.
