Until recently, you could count Nigerian female filmmakers on one hand, but they seem to be rubbing shoulders with their male counterparts. One such filmmaker is Alexandra Hul, who told TheNiche she had always known she would be a filmmaker.
“Filmmaking is a form of expression for me, and I am inspired by my environment. I have always loved to tell stories from my own perspective, point of view, which seems more interesting,” said the economics graduate from the University of Abuja (UNIABUJA), who hails from Benue State.
But until she came across the filmmaker, Grace Edwin-Okon, at the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF), she had been content with making short films.
“It was a very inspiring festival and after that she (Edwin-Okon) gave me a call that she was about to start a beneficiary programme and would like me to be involved in it,” Hul recalled.
That is how Alexandra Hul and other young directors pitched feature-length film projects, with hers titled ‘Mrs and Mrs Johnson’ emerging the first ever beneficiary of the OneShot initiative by Edwin-Okon.
The initiative provides an opportunity for young filmmakers who have never shot a feature-length film to do so.
The 90-minute ‘Mrs and Mrs Johnson’, the young filmmaker said, is a tale of two women who find out that they are married to one and the same man after a chance meeting at the hospital. The film is their journey from betrayal to accepting their fate and the power to move on and how they will move on.
The inspiring experience that is OneShot, Alexandra explained, gave her room to experiment, hone her craft and learn new things.
Looking like she can do very well as an actress while responding to questions during the interview in TheNiche Boardroom, one cannot help but ask her whether she would also try her skills on the other side of the camera, but her response says she knows what she wants.
“I don’t intend to act; but as a filmmaker, storyteller before I found film and knew what film could do, I told my story in the form of literature, prose,” said Alexandra who never attended film school.
But, she said, it never sat well; hence she was never able to finish a book because it didn’t feel complete, the same with the stage play, which she found while at university.
Her words: “I could never finish a stage script because it didn’t feel complete, whole or comfortable. But the first time I saw an original well-formatted professional screenplay, the first thing that came to mind was, yes, this is how I have always seen my film and this is how I want to write it. That is why it is pretty hard for me to tell stories with other mediums because the only way I see my story is as a film.”
Speaking further on why acting is not her thing, she said that “even in secondary school economics, they teach you division of labour, and one thing you need to understand in this industry or in life generally is that everyone has his place and you should know your place.
“Filmmaking is like a body and we all come together to create a beautiful thing called film and everybody has to do their own part. So the actor acts, the director directs and the set designer designs the set while the DOP (Director of Photography) does the camera work, and we all give it our best in what we know how to do,” she declared.
Describing herself as a Youtube alumna, she said everything she learned about filmmaking is from Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, going on set and from anyone and everyone willing to teach.
“I think I am best described by the proverb that says a child is trained by a village because as a filmmaker my success could be attributed to a lot of people who helped me in one way or another and given me a chance to be able to work,” she stated.
For someone who lives in the part of the world where dreams are daily shattered, success is definitely the word to describe daily doing what you dreamt of doing.