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Inspiration for the subject matter came from a newspaper
article featuring a young man who could lift over 50kg of metal with his teeth.
Such a feat, even for my country Nigeria, was news worthy. A visit
to his residence, a one-room apartment in a ghetto in the Idi-araba area of Lagos, turned out to be
an odyssey.
The ghetto dress, dance and mannerisms, all products of
survival exigencies, had crept up on society and ghetto culture had taken up
the toga of credibility. In an ironic twist of social justice the elite who
create and define social class, now struggle to achieve legitimacy by aping the
“slumdog”, a product of their social snobbery. The ghetto’s triumph over
elitism hit me like a bolt out of the blues!
To produce this documentary, I toured Idi-araba, made a list
of interviewees both in and outside the ghetto. I developed the script, did a
storyboard, a location rekee, before finally shooting.
My challenges included aggression from some ghetto
characters and inavailability of some key characters at necessary times.
My ambition as a documentary maker is to tell a story,
depicting a unique perspective to a seemingly common or ordinary experience or
occurrence.
