Nollywood filmmaker, Kunle Afolayan has explained that actress Temi Otedola‘s inability to speak Yoruba fluently in Citation, his newly-released movie, was for a reason.
Feeding answers to questions directed at him during a zoom conference, Afolayan said he’s aware that Otedola was not a fluent Yoruba speaker, but he didn’t mind because of his aim.
“I have been seeing a lot of comments in regards to Temi Otedola’s Yoruba intonation and pronunciation. That wasn’t a mistake, it was being deliberate because she doesn’t speak Yoruba. And when you ask a lot of them like her, they’ll say if I say it, people laugh at me and I always say to my kids that let them laugh, it’s just like you saying if I am learning French, so if I speak it, a French man will laugh at me,” he stated.
On how the efforts made to at least brush-up Otedola’s Yoruba-speaking, Afolayan revealed: “The script was originally written in English, but some of the scenes that we did in Yoruba were deliberate.
“I had to pair her with Gabriel and months before the shoot, they started rehearsing how to speak the Yoruba language properly. I guess that helped a bit [Laughs].
When asked the reason for his action, the revered filmmaker explained: “At the back of my mind, what I wanted to achieve with that is to encourage people of that age grade, to encourage a lot of our kids who are schooling abroad and the youths who are schooling abroad, and other people don’t speak a word of our language.
“I am sure that by the time a lot of them see the film, they will want to speak it; they’ll be like if she can do it, “I can also speak it”. As you watched in the movie, she was nice with it, and fun to watch as well.”
Meanwhile, Otedola who was polylingual in Citation, which premiered on Netflix on Friday, November 6, 2020, said her role in the movie was challenging, but she loves it that way.
Her words: “When I first read the script, obviously everything was written down in English but of course Uncle Kunle had told me that okay, this is going to be a polylingual film, not just bilingual -there are going to be many different languages throwing in and luckily when it comes to languages I like a challenge. Right there, I knew that was going to be a challenge but I was really up for it and I felt like if you are not pushing yourself to something you are not even sure you can maybe even do, you know what’s the point?
“I really saw it as a way to dive in with a role that will be challenging for me. Once I read the script in English, then I started the work; not only memorising my lines but memorizing my lines in three different languages. For weeks, my manager and I only spoke in French. I have been speaking French throughout school, so I just had to brush up on that.”
