BY GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR
THE bearded film maker is agitated this evening. He is seated on a stool in his studio, going through the final editing of his film, Tango with me, a 35mm celluloid film shot over five months period with some of the best hands around.
As I walk into his studio on Ajao Road, Surulere, Lagos, he motions me to a seat. His phone beeps. He reads the message; takes a deep breath. He picks up his blackberry and connects with a film laboratory in Sofia, Bulgaria.
“I’ll send the video and audio so that you can see what I mean,” he demurs. “Now, I’m sure everything will be done pretty soon so that we can hit the market.”
He has just come back from Bulgaria, where he closed in on a deal for the final processing of his film. He had earlier gone to Dubai, where he discovered that a little technical issue needed to be sorted out in his grand cinematic project.
So, let’s Tango now? Why has there been delay in the release?
“It is truly not long. In an ideal this is truly very fast. This lady, Chineze Anyaene started shooting her film, Ije, in 2007 and we did not get to see it until 2010. So, there’s nothing wrong in that you have to get your onions right. If you don’t do that, you will run into trouble. I rushed to come back from Bulgaria to come to Nigeria, look at what I’m doing now. You have to get it right. Filmmaking, notwithstanding the format you’re shooting, filmmaking is a painstaking process. There are no short cuts about it.”
What is the film all about?
“It's a feature film, a serious psychological drama. Tango as you know is a dance, and dance in this context is used as a metaphor for marriage and it symbolizes love. Taking
a cue from the cliché, It takes two to tango, we are simply saying here that it takes two people to make marriage work. The film is about a young couple who were faced with adversity on the eve of their wedding. How they were able to resolve the issues that arose from the difficulty is what the film is about. The film is about forgiveness; it’s about self-discovery on the part of both of them; it’s about some of the values we are beginning to ignore or take for granted in our country: issues of infidelity, issues of life; issues about how we cope with problems when we face them, how our parents affect us and how our decisions affect every thing around us,” he says. “The film is a blend of everything, ranging from a true life story and fiction because this script is well researched. It took me almost two years to get it out. I spoke with about five different people who have had similar experiences as expressed in the film; I spoke to two clinical psychologists as well.”
Is he astonished how much of a filmmaker he has become since he directed A Place Called Home for M-net?
MAHMOOD Abayomi Ali-Balogun, an urbane gentleman, talented artiste and shrewd businessman— traits that have catapulted him in the rung— says excitedly, “as a child, we all had dreams of becoming engineers, pilots and all that; at a certain point, it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be. The virtue of experiences I had going to the theatre then in Kano shaped what I eventually chose as a career. I had always been a focused person, though I still did those things youths of my age indulged in, even in the university. Though I was not reading much, I was, however, excelling because I was focused.”
His voice is one of his distinctive qualities. His sentences are punctuated by measured smiles. And when he reminisces on childhood memories, the voice is soft and engaging.
Nodding his head and gurgling with satisfaction, Mahmood says, “while I was young, I had the privilege of going to movies with my father in Kano to watch Indian and Chinese films and that trend continued till I grew up picking interest in the theatre and maintaining the habit formed from childhood with my late elder brother; that opportunity exposed me to the cinema and made me to pick Dramatic Arts in the university, specialising in film and television production. And more, the Information Unit of the Information Ministry in Kano, then, had mobile cinema that enabled us to watch different films; and when they wanted to bring in any campaign, they first of all showed films to us, these experiences endeared me to filmmaking.”
You’ll expect parents who are highly religious to discourage their children from a discipline as theatre, but that is not the case with Mahmood.
He reflects, “every child wanted to be a medical doctor, lawyer or engineer; so, in my secondary school, I picked-up interest in the sciences, until a year to my final year in Ahmadiya Secondary School, Kano, when suddenly, the school’s laboratory got burnt. Though some student changed school to continue with their sciences, I couldn’t. My father, being a strong member of Ahmadiya Mission, didn’t make me consider that option; instead I changed to the Arts and then dreamed of becoming a lawyer. I later changed to Dramatic Arts because a friend of mine was studying it in the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife). The effect of their — my parents— influence in my life while growing up did not make them feel bad about what I was going to study in the university. They did not see me as a layabout because they knew I was a focused person.”
Tilting his head to look at me, Mahmood says, since the moment he entered the profession he has not had to look back. He says modestly, “I remember when I got to Ife; I took part in a production in the very first week I got there. I was really involved right from the beginning; besides, I had some experience while in the primary school, where I was involved in those school plays, but at Ife, I had the real thing getting involved in real production. In my first production, I made one or two mistakes, but I carried on; I was not much of an actor, but more of a behind-the-scene person. Maybe because I was very much involved in the technical theatre, that led to the choice of my specialisation. Even, when I left the university, I had been directing plays though acted once or twice, for most times it has been behind-the-scene part for me.”
SO, why is directing an attraction for Mahmood?
“One reason I do it is that as a director, you are the visioner and direct things to your specification. As a director, film will help me to bring change to the status quo, to begin to affect people’s life that is why I’m more comfortable with documentary, which is what I do mostly, where you have that ability to bring out some of the anomalies with a view to bringing about solutions, because when showcased it will be in minds of Nigerians to effect the necessary changes like I did with the pollution of the environment. I did that documentary with a view to change people’s attitude as well as effect positive changes on the environment, for if you begin to change the individual, surely he will get there: changing the society is the driving force for me and to impact on life.”
Mahmood says tensely, getting to his feet, “my works, be they documentary or features, are advocacy driven. They, as a matter of choice, highlight one societal issue or the other so as to bring about a rethink or change. Be it right issues for kids and women or issues on environment, disease and the need for us to believe in ourselves as a people. I do not create just for entertainment; there is always an underlying commitment to add value to human existence.”
WITH people’s poor attitude to documentary, you’ll be wondering how Ali-Balogun’s works have wormed their way into the hearts of Nigerians.
He grimaces and curls his finger. “Nigeria is a complex nation, you’re right to say that documentary heralded motion pictures in the country by the virtue that our colonial masters used it for propaganda to project whatever vision they had for the country and as a result, solicited for loyalty and when our nationalist took over, they also followed the same way. The various governments funded those productions.”
He adds confidently, documentaries require a lot of fund because they showcase what is being done or not done. They are not entertaining materials though you can make them to be, depending on how you go about it.
“Why I said the country is kind of complex is that we took over from the British right from the days of WNTV (Western Nigeria Television, the first TV station in Africa) to NBC, production don’t just happen, somebody has to pay for and the content user is usually the one that pays for it, in this sense, who is the content user? In the past, it was the colonial masters, who paid for those content and the Nigerian government were also paying for those content materials. In its days, the western government also funded WNTV, and they paid for content, be it drama, documentary or any of their programmes.”
He sits bold upright and remarks quietly, “as the nation grew, there was a disconnect, in the sense that NTA kind of became the only propaganda tool across the nation; it was like the only TV house in the nation. They also started commissioning programmes, be it magazine programmes or others, suddenly, funding began to dwindle to the extent that we don’t have any station that pays for content, I’m just generalising, because we will go to the real issue.”
According to Ali-Balogun, in other parts of the world, there is usually the commissioning editor, who commissions production, but in Nigeria, there are none.
“I doubt how many of them know of commissioning editor, because everything is done upside down; here you produce a content, they want you to pay to put it on air and they are the ones that are in need of the content; so, that disconnect has affected the production of content in the country. On BBC or CNN, you have all manners of programmes, which are funded by stations either they source for the fund or use their money, but here you don’t have such; so, in the past we used to have a lot of documentaries because NTA used to fund it but because of the dwindling fund we do not have them again and documentary is not that kind of entertainment you rush home to watch, for it could be incisive and so, it’s difficult to get people fund it, the dwindling funding has affected production and because we love entertainment, the theatre has taken over.”
As he goes to get drinks for two in his fridge, Mahmood says with all frankness, “documentary involves a lot of research work and a very serious business while other forms of entertainment are not so, you don’t readily get people to fund it easily unlike features and drama. This is responsible for the lopsidedness of not having too much documentary.”
He observes that reality programmes have taken over the air space in Nigeria, though documentary are still being done, but not as they should.
As the air condition in his office whirrs coolly, he confesses, “documentary does not fetch you that immediacy, people may not even know you as the producer. A documentary can take you the next two to three years and you are still; just like the one I did on our traditional marriage (Efik marriage) that lasted for two years because I needed to follow it up, unlike TV drama that you put in your creativity and within days or weeks, you are done. It’s not a make believe, but a world of reality; this is why a lot of people shy away from it irrespective of the funding; imagine the ones coming from the Discovery Channel of how birds hatch, you see the films from the laying of the egg in the bush to the hatching, you just discover that somebody somewhere did the filming and how they take off, the lest you can take in shooting that kind of a film would be a year. Documentary is not a microwave thing as films in Nigeria are turning to.”
He adds sternly, “you know how uneasy it is to prepare meals in the traditional way, but with microwaves, it’s done within minutes, that is the way films are produced in Nigeria. Filmmaking is tedious whether documentary or movies, you have to get your production right, from the script to location and when you shoot, even when you edit. It’s something you have to plan very well, but the reverse is the case. Though these used to be the norm in the past, maybe with the changing times such things have also changed; thank God people are now beginning to know that filmmaking goes beyond microwave of a thing and are now beginning to pay attention to details and the right norm.”
HIS verdict on Nollywood?
He adjusts his seating position, sips a glass of the non-alcoholic drink in his front and says, “it’s a wonderful and great phenomenon in the country. It’s an industry that struggled to take off and having taking off has gone to the extent of becoming the second largest in the world. However, people who woke up the sleeping elephant should know that they need to keep it walking.”
He adds, “Nollywood did not start the movie industry in Nigeria, for the industry has been there for long. To me, it is a kind or renaissances within Nigerian film industry, if you go back to the history of Europe, you know that renaissances brought all manners of art to the fore and eventually all the writers began to crystallise, the great artist and others and they left that to what we have to today. My take is that today, it is a rising star, as movies of low quality are beginning to give way to better ones. The industry came to fill the vacuum just like Renaissance did in Europe.”
One way that Nollywood could be made to meet up with expectation is for talents to be honed, he whispers conspiratorially, his grey beards standing beautifully on edge. “Talent is one thing, education is another. You could have talent and you don’t have the right education, that is, the right tools to hold that talent you have and you get messed up. You must combine both education and talent. Talent cannot just work on its own; it is too raw to be left alone. Education refines your talent. This is what is affecting the industry. A lot of people have talent, but they have refused to pick the right education or honing of their skills. Hence, the stunted growth we have in the industry.”
He adds, “the thing about filmmaking is that the passion has to be there. The money is something that usually comes after. For the real filmmaker, the first thing that comes is passion. I’m not saying that money is not important, but without the right passion, there won’t be anything else to work for. I know it is very tenacious in Nollywood. Filmmaking is not all about money. Though money drives, but you must have a drive of what you want to do. If you don’t have that drive, even with the whole money in the world, you will end up a failure.”
MAHMOOD is not too excited about the president’s $200 million largesse to entertainment industry. He couldn’t help, but giggle. “Largesse,” he asks in a manner that seems derisive, but not. He only sought to clarify issues. “The money is not a largesse or national cake, but from my findings, that money is not coming from the Federal Government, it is from the World Bank and it’s an incentive from that organisation to help the entertainment industry in Nigeria to be properly structured. You know when such money comes, they don’t come like that, they come with counterpart funding; so, we don’t know the modality government wants to use with regards to disbursement. How the money is to be funded is not clear to us because it’s not just for Nollywood, but for the entertainment industry in the country. But what we should know is that part funding is coming from World Bank then support funding from the government; whether the part funding is going to come as loans or grants, we still don’t know.”
What, however, is important to him is that no matter how it comes, it must have a necessary template for people to access it officially and to know what to use it for.”
YOU’ll hardly catch Mahmood dress down. Today, he’s wearing an outfit that brings out his youthfulness. At 52, he has a very athletic body and good height. Could this have had influence on his wife in her choice?
Mahmood, a simple God-fearing person, answers, “we developed friendship and she ended up being my wife. We met in NTA in 1988 and we got married in the 90s. One thing led to the other. We were first friends. We’ve been together now, courtship and all that, almost 25 years. In every relationship, especially, marriage, what matters is understanding one another. It is all about compromises. In every relationship, it is give and take; you can’t always have it your way. When both of you come to that understanding, you can surmount the pressures. But above that, it is God.”
How has he been able to manage his profile?
“I owe everything to God, the author and finisher of my faith. Like I told you from the onset, I’m a very focused person. I do everything with the fear of God at the background.”
BORN on July 19, 1959 in Kano, the culture worker and Managing Director of Brickwall Communications Limited, is a strong advocate for a virile motion picture industry.
Mahmood, who is first President of National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP), past Vice President of the Independent Television Producers Association of Nigeria (ITPAN) and founding member of the Conference of Motion Picture Practitioners of Nigeria (CMPPN), worked briefly at the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) before moving on to set up Brickwall Communications, an outfit that has produced commercials, documentaries and films for some A-list corporate organisations.
Mahmood has been resource person to a number of training institutions within and outside Nigeria and is married to Nkechi Ali-Balogun (Nee Eze) and both have two children, Abimbola and Ikeoluwa.
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