Ogochukwu Ekezie: It’s Interesting Being in Industry 

Where Women Are Driving Things

As a storyteller and creative, Ogochukwu Ekezie has stayed close to her passion as possible, telling award- winning brand stories prior to delving into human interest stories. Ekezie nurtures a mission to elevate African storytelling through movies that not only entertain but also stir conscience. She takes Ferdinand Ekechukwu through her career path, her journey into filmmaking, her recent movie production which marks her Nollywood debut. She also touched on other facets of her multifaceted career and as CEO Red Sand Studios… Excerpts:

Can you share with us your background with regards to storytelling and filmmaking?

Most people that know me know I have been thinking about this in the last 20 to 25 years. Before I came back to Nigeria this is what I wanted to do. When I was coming back to Nigeria in 2002/2003, I said to my parents that I wanted to open up movie theatres and in typical form they said ‘ah nobody watches movies in Nigeria’. But I had started having conversation with different production companies around the world and I knew that, they had told me they were talking to certain potential partners in Nigeria. And literarily six months after I had moved back to Nigeria, Silverbird opened so that sort of started the journey of movie cinemas and stuff. And prior to that I thought I would end up in LA (Los Angeles) and do some internship. But life sort of took me to the direction it took me, I came back to Nigeria. My major is in journalism but with a specialisation in advertising. So, I have always been in that advertising/marketing space even before I came back to Nigeria. When I came back here my first job was as brand manager ARM Investment Managers and from there I moved to Citibank of Nigeria as Public Affairs Officer for Nigeria and Ghana and then I moved to Union Bank as Head of Corporate Communications during the turnaround after the new investors came in and subsequently became the General Manager/Chief Brand and Marketing Officer. So, if I track my trajectory, what I have done for the last 25 years as a professional in my career is basically tell brand stories. As a brand manager you are the custodian for the brand’s story and the story you tell about the brand, the customers and giving that brand life. So, I would say that I see the link basically from brand stories. I try to stay as close to my passion as possible. I think I have made the jump from brand storytelling to narrative storytelling. And that’s the link I make in terms of when I think about my career and how it links from even though I was mostly in the fine arts industry, I always say to people that I worked in banking, but I was not a banker because I was in one track which was in the brand marketing and communication space. That’s the way I would track my journey basically from brand storytelling to narrative storytelling.

So from brand storytelling to telling human interest stories like you just did with your new movie Wèrè?

Yes, you can say human interest stories absolutely because the stories that you tell basically when you try to tell a story you are basically telling a story about a protagonist and an antagonist. And these are human beings that you are trying to fully explore all the dimensions of them and the situations that they are in and it depends on the theme that you are exploring in that particular film. So, they are definitely absolutely human stories, diverse stories and narrative stories essentially.

The movie Wèrè, is it a short or a feature film?

It’s a short film… 23 minutes and 26 seconds.

Why the tile Wèrè?

The title character Wèrè, the movie is set in Ojota, Lagos. We shot it at Ojota bridge so you can imagine how Ojota bus stop, on top of that pedestrian bridge which is where the character lives, looks like. That’s what mad people walking on the streets of Lagos are called. That’s where it came from. So that’s what it basically was. The movie is about a woman in Lagos. We don’t even know where the woman is from. People just assumed because they are in Lagos, it’s Wèrè. Because that is how as a people refer to mentally ill people we see on the streets in Lagos especially is what they are called.

What platform was it released?

The movie, because it’s a short film, is currently making the festival rounds right now. This was actually the Lagos premiere that we had here and that’s the African premiere. It actually premiered in New York in May at the New York African Film Festival and we are hoping it would show in a few more festivals before the end of the year before we then put it on any of the major platforms for people to access it. But for now as a short film it’s going through the movie festivals across the world. That’s where we are now.

Why did you decide to tell such story in such time looking at the themes – mental health, homelessness and mob justice – explored if you want to talk about one extensively, it could take more time?

When I started this, I did a bit of writing, but I usually say I’m not a much disciplined writer. So, sometime in early 2023, a mutual friend introduced me to Dolapo Marinho, who is the writer and the director of the film to collaborate and basically become writing partners. We shared some writing samples with each other and one of her writing that she shared with me was a short story that she had written called ‘Under Bridge’ which featured this character who was homeless and was dealing with some mental issues and had a whole backstory as to their lives and how they ended up on the street. I had written a few other short stories that I thought would be my first project. But once I read that story, it sort of touched me and I said to her ‘listen I think you can adapt this into a short screenplay.’ She had never written a screenplay before. She always did novel and short stories. I worked her through the process of writing a screenplay. She did the first draft, it came back I gave it some editing and changes. I would say it took us, I think a process of maybe four weeks or so to get a draft of a script that we wanted to shoot. I was very clear that it was going to be a short film for me because it came from a short story anyway. And for us the goal was to tell a story that leaves more questions than answers. And I think that we succeeded in doing that because most people that had seen the movie always end up coming out and asking a lot of questions like why this, and why that. There were specific questions that we wanted people to come out of the film asking. And you know luckily for us people have gotten it and were able to ask those questions. So, because we believe that it’s in asking questions that we really think of how we live in a society and some of the things we are sensitive to and the things that we are insensitive to or just desensitised to. It’s from asking those questions that we think about basically the environment around us and how we exist as people and how we look at this people on the street and make certain assumptions about who they are or how they’ve ended up where they’ve ended up on.

So far, how has it been navigating your path as a creative/producer?

I think it’s been good. Part of what I wanted to also do with this project and to your question around why did I decide to make a short movie, one of the things I wanted to do was to really test my assumptions about the industry. In my head, some of the thoughts that I had was to get my feet work in terms of actually executing a full production, but make it as compact as possible, almost like a proof of concept. For me, the journey has been interesting. When you are home watching a football match, you know everything –  you are the player, you are the coach, you see everything that is wrong and right during the match but you are not on the field playing. So, there’s a tendency to armchair quarterback when you are not in it and say ‘oh I think this is what we should do and what people should do.’ You know now being in it and being able to test some of those theories and test some of those assumptions and test some of those things.  So, it was important for me to take some time and to understand really how the industry works in reality and how things function in reality when you are on set and trying to deliver a production. So, it’s been interesting so far. I think that the film helped me navigate some of those things and learn in a real life setting. We continue to learn and continue to grow and I think we continue to learn with more productions that we do the more that there are lessons to take from there.

Were there specific challenges you encountered within this short space as a filmmaker what were they?

What I would say is that for me I have an idea of what good looks like and I’m an avid film lover. I have watched films for longest all my life essentially and what I’m hoping for and what I’m trying to do is to find people with the same sensibility. One of the things that I did when I was trying to put together the cast and the crew, we looked for the people that were right for the roles. But in terms of putting together the crew, people that worked behind the scenes, people that essentially were responsible for delivering the quality of the production that I wanted to deliver was to find people of like minds.

You may disagree on how to get there, but you know what the end product should look like and you agree that there’s a certain standard that you are aspiring to. For me, I think the challenge was to always find the people and finding people with similar sensibilities and strong opinions really.

A good number of women have found their way into filmmaking, most telling African stories. What do you think is responsible for this shift?

(Smiling)… It’s interesting, I actually I don’t know. For the longest time the industry was run by a lot of men and it seems in the last 10-15 years the women have sort of come into their own if you think of and talk about Mo Abudu; Chioma Ude who is doing AFRIFF, you talk about Ijeoma Onah who is creating market with her NIFS, it’s interesting. The industry has sort of ceded way for women and it’s interesting for me. It’s exciting for me to be in an industry where women are seen to be at the forefront of driving things. I think this question will not be asked if it was men running the industry so its ok (laughing). We don’t need to question it, it’s what it is and I think its fine. I’m not sure what is responsible for it but I’m excited about it.

With regards with what you do now is there any aspect of your childhood that you could look to that influenced your move in filmmaking/storytelling?

My parents will tell you I was always a dramatic child, but I mean I have no desire to be in front of a camera. I’m always going to be behind the scenes. I have always been creatively inclined. In my thinking and in my ideation, I think I’m a big ideas person. I always have big ideas and I am never bereft of ideas. There’s always things running around in my head and my challenge is always to sit down and execute or sit down and get them done. So, it’s taken me 20years to finally get to this point and I’ve always wanted to be in this space. I remember when before I left Nigeria one of the things that I thought I would do if I went to school in Nigeria was to study Mass Communication. I was that way inclined and I ended up in this space that I can’t really pinpoint one thing that I would say was my trigger for creativity. But I just think I have always had ideas in my head and the challenge to just have to bring them to life.

You run Red Sand Studios with you mission to elevate African storytelling through movies that not only entertain, but also stir the conscience. Speak to us more about this?

I want to tell our diverse stories I want to tell them well. And in telling them well, first and foremost you need to be able to entertain people. Now it depends on the kind of entertainment you are talking about. If you think of movies like Schindler’s List, if you think of movies like Hotel Rwanda, these are difficult films with difficult topics. There’s a level of entertainment there in the fact that they were done well from production point of view. But they are tough stories to tell. If I look at our environment here in Nigeria today and I look at our world today, I feel like there’s a lot that we need to be talking about; there’s a lot that we need to say. There are so many stories that we haven’t told… historical stories. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think one of the biggest ticking bombs that we have is our inability to even just tell our stories, our history truthfully. You know we stopped teaching history in school. So, these things are dying away. So a lot of the history that we tell today is about the one that the white man has told us; the colonisers, those are the narratives that we still subscribe to. So, if you think about the breadth of stories that haven’t been told yet, if you think about the world that we live in today, the Nigeria that we live in today, are we really a functioning society? I want to be able to make films that make people ask questions of themselves and say is this the best of who we can be as a person?  I want to make films that show the world that we live in as it is; show the world as we think it should be. Could we be in a better world? Can we question certain things and say can we do better as people? Films and movies are powerful tools. We need to be able to celebrate ourselves through movies. We also need to be able to question ourselves through the films that we watch and ask ourselves if we can be able to do better as a people and then in times when we do well or we do better we can celebrate the fact that we have done well. That’s what I mean by that.

What should we be expecting from you and Red Sand Studios?

We have a few projects on our slate that we are working on – two feature films and one TV series that’s in development. The first feature film which I can really talk about now is based on real life story by a major Nigerian author and I think that will be a very interesting film when we finally get it done. It’s a human interest story that we all should be interested in. The second one is something that I will say I wrote the first draft of, but obviously it needs to be reworked into a much better draft. We are not anywhere close to the final shooting script but that is in the work. The last one is a TV series that is set in the banking industry. Because I spent almost 20 years of my career there, I have a lot to say about that industry. It will be good to show that industry in its full, I hesitate to say glory, but in its full glory I guess is what I would say.