Thanks Shadow & Act for this great profile of my work, part of Tambay Obenson’s #BlackWomenFilmmakersSpeak series highlighting 33 women filmmakers. Read the excerpt of my interview below and read the whole profile on S&A.
Black Women Filmmakers Speak is a series curated by Shadow and Act that spotlights women visionaries in film and their inspiring body of work. For the full introduction to this series and an overview of the filmmakers featured, head here.
Hollywood’s story has long been a white, heterosexual male-dominated narrative, and a key goal for #BlackWomenFilmmakersSpeak is to celebrate up-and-coming black women filmmakers who are taking the simple, seemingly radical step of telling their stories. Working across all genres, these filmmakers all share a love of cinema and an appreciation for the power it wields, engaging what the status quo might see as a kind of new cinema language to not only entertain but also enlighten.
For the series, 33 black women filmmakers from around the world completed a survey Shadow And Act issued in response to a call made earlier this year aiming to highlight black women filmmakers at some stage of development on their first feature films. We then packaged each reply into individual features highlighting these filmmakers and their feature film projects, their fears and hopes as first-time feature directors and their thoughts on a variety of topical matters. That includes what some are calling a new renaissance in black cinema today, the disruption of content production and distribution by streaming behemoths like Netflix and Amazon and more. Their survey profiles will be published daily (one per day) on Shadow and Act over the next month.
Ultimately, we hope these stories bring new awareness and admiration around these relatively unknown visionaries.
If you’re just joining us, you can catch up on these previous profiles:
— New York City-based filmmaker Cathleen Campbell
— Los Angeles-based filmmaker Martine Jean
— Los Angeles-based filmmaker Numa Perrier
— London-based filmmaker Sade Adeniran
— New York City-based filmmaker Lydia Darly
— London-based filmmaker Sheila Nortley
— New York City-based Dr. Gillian Scott-Ward
— Johannesburg, South Africa-based filmmaker Zamo Mkhwanazi
— Los Angeles-based actress, director and entrepreneur Tanya Wright
— Gros Islet, Saint Lucia-based writer and director Davina Lee
— Dallas, Texas-based writer and director Seckeita Lewis
— Edinburgh, Scotland-based award-winning filmmaker Victoria Thomas
The series continues today with Brooklyn, New York-based Iquo B. Essien. Read our conversation below.
Introduce yourself and your project.
My name is Iquo B. Essien and I’m a Nigerian-American writer and director based in Brooklyn, New York. I received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts in film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
I studied biology as an undergrad and ultimately wasn’t passionate about science and medicine, so I decided to pursue a creative career since I’d grown up doing lots of performing arts and also danced and sang at Stanford. I trained in classical piano and violin as a child and performed West African dance, modern and roots all through college. My first real job was at a strategic communications firm serving global health clients such as the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. When I left that job, I did lots of odd creative jobs including writing for some African magazines, blogging and medical copyediting. I deeply wanted to be a professional dancer until I had a bad dance audition and realized that probably wasn’t in the cards for me.
After seeing Nanette Burstein’s IFC docu-series Film School, I thought film might be something I could do, so I applied to Tisch. I had never made a film before, but I’d been in performing arts groups since I was a child, working creatively with diverse people, and that seemed the main skill needed in addition to creativity and gumption. I got accepted on a platform of telling stories about Africa, women and immigrants, and I guess the rest is history!
It wasn’t easy, though. I went broke many times and had to go on leave from work, so I took quite a while to get through the program (I finally had my thesis review in September 2015, and walked for graduation in May 2016), as I worked on finding my creative voice. I now write, direct and edit films, viewing them as tools for storytelling and connecting people with ideas that can create social change. I sometimes think, had I done well at that dance audition, I would’ve never made a film. So, in a certain way, I’m grateful that I blew it because film allows me to bring all of those sensibilities—writing, movement, sound and music—together in one medium. That said, I’ve learned the most about directing from dancing, how to choreograph bodies in space, how to use pacing while you edit. I realize it’s something you can’t teach.
My films have screened in 15 countries worldwide, including at the Panafrican Film & Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the Durban International Film Festival, New York African Film Festival and Zanzibar International Film Festival.
My short film Aissa’s Story was nominated for the 2013 Student Academy Awards, 2015 Africa Movie Academy Awards and won Best Student Short at the 2014 Africa International Film Festival. I’m developing the short into a feature film with 234 Media, and I am currently crowdfunding my Nigeria-based debut feature film, Back Home, at backhomefilm.com.
The story: Seventeen years after she left home, Emem returns to Nigeria to care for her ailing grandmother. On this hilarious journey, she confronts her identity, finds love, faces loss and discovers a story waiting to be told.
In addition to the film projects, I’ve written a memoir, Elizabeth’s Daughter, about losing my mother to cancer that I’m hoping to publish soon. My production company, Editi Films, is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas.
Read more on S&A.