2020 Nollywood drama Eyimofe has received praise from international audiences, festival directors, critics and industry media as an outstanding effort by Arie and Chuko Esiri, brothers and co-directors of their first feature film.
The GDN Studios-produced movie takes an unflinching look at the pressures of everyday life in Nigeria, the desperate measures people take to survive; and the unrelenting desire to escape to a better life abroad, by whatever means. It traces the parallel lives of Mofe, a stoic electrician and part-time security guard, and Rosa, a struggling hairdresser, both trying to navigate illegal ways of fleeing the country.
EELive.ng caught up with the filmmaking twin brothers at a press screening and they spoke about how the acclaimed movie came to be. When asked about what inspired such an out-of-the-box story like Eyimofe; Esiri said, “The seed of the idea came to me about 9 years ago when I first moved back.”
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“I was going through this reacquaintance phase with Nigeria. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay and I was thinking of going out. But the longer I stayed, the more I discovered myself and my people and then the story involved in that.”
The second inspiration for the Esiri brothers was a movie they watched over a decade ago. “We are very big fans of The Bicycle Thief, it’s an Italian film made in the 1950s,” Esiri said. “It’s about a man who uses his bicycle for work and someone steals his bicycle and the film is him trying to find the bicycle.”
He continued, “My brother and I watched this film 12 years ago, we felt it was such a shame that we don’t see these stories here. So that was a big inspiration as well. Our hope is that 10-15 years from now, somebody younger and more talented than us watches this film somewhere; and they can say, ‘I want to tell a story about my reality here in Warri or wherever.'”
Lastly, he added, “The inspiration is wanting to tell the most authentic story. After all, we have that authenticity in music, and literature and theatre. So, why don’t we have it in film?”