Hot Gist: Film adaptation of ‘Imagine This’ by Nigerian-British novelist underway

Abuja – `Imagine This’, award winning book by Nigerian-British writer Sade Adeniran is currently being developed into a feature film. Adeniran, who is scripting and producing the film, revealed this at an interview with a UK based media – Shadow and Act which she shared on her Twitter page @Imagine_This on Tuesday. Sade Adeniran The novel won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (African region), and was shortlisted for the World Book Day “Books to Talk About” award.

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                         Sade Adeniran

 The script has reached the second round of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and won the British Urban Film Festival Award for Best Script Talent. Adeniran said, “Imagine This is a 90-minute animated feature adapted from my award-winning book of the same name. “It’s a coming-of-age drama which follows the story of Lola Ogunwole, who, along with her brother, is taken back home to Nigeria after growing up in London. “The overarching themes are displacement, loss of identity and otherness. 

This project was recently selected for the 2018 Durban Talents Lab,” she said. Speaking on the influence of filmmakers in pop culture, Adeniran said that she has the responsibility to tell her truth as a British Nigerian. She said, “I always wanted to be a filmmaker but didn’t dare to follow my dreams, so, instead, I got myself a corporate job as a consultant and worked on my creative projects as a hobby. “After I published my debut novel to critical success, I decided to pursue filmmaking as a career. It’s been a slow process, but as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Adeniran said.

 She was born in London to Nigerian parents, and at the age of eight was taken back to her father’s village in Nigeria, living with her grandmother in Idogun, Ondo State, before returning to the UK. 

When she could not find a publisher in 2008, she decided to self-publish and in order to sell the 1100 copies she had printed, created a marketing campaign that led the book to critical acclaim. Adeniran, who is also a producer and director and is also working on another film ‘Two Weddings’’, has five short films to her credit including two live action: More Cake (2013) and A Mother’s Journey (2016). The other three are what she calls ‘experimental animation’ and they are Mrs. Bolanle Benson (2015), My Mother’s Stew (2017) and E Go Betta Oh (2018).