Meet the Bosses: Tom Rowland-Rees and Kenneth Gyang, Cinema Kpatakpata

  Connect Nigeria had the opportunity to chat with these two bosses about their company, Cinema Kpatakpata and about the Nigerian movie industry. Their determination to chart new paths and set standards in Nollywood when it comes to storytelling and quality cinematic production is evident in their responses discussions. CN: Tell us a bit about your professional background? KG: I am an award-winning producer and director for Film and Television and co-founder of the film production company Cinema Kpatakpata. Our company’s first feature film script ConfusionNaWa secured funding from Hubert Bals Fund in Netherlands and was also selected as part of the 2010 Durban FilmMart in South Africa. Our finished film won Best Film and Best Nigerian Film at the 2013 African Movie Academy Awards. The Hausa-language political love story Blood & Henna, my second feature film, which I co-wrote and directed was also nominated in six categories at the same event (Best Film in an African Language, Best Nigerian Film, Best Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Best Production Design and Costume). Confusion Na Wa won the Movie of the Year, Director of the Year, Best Screenplay, Best Production Design and Best Edited Movie at the 2013 Best of Nollywood Awards. This film was also an official selection at the prestigious Africa International Film Festival 2013 and the 2014 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles where it won the Special Jury Recognition- Feature Narrative award. I studied Film Production at the National Film Institute and screenwriting at Gaston Kabore’s IMAGINE in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. After graduation in 2006, I went straight on to work with the BBC World Service Trust as director of Wetin Dey, a TV drama series which addresses social issues facing young people in Nigeria and West Africa. The show is widely recognized to have set new standards in Nigerian media. In December 2013, I was chosen as one of the “100 Guardians of the Future” honored by President Goodluck Jonathan. Cinema Kpatakpata has just finished shooting a TV series titled How I Made My First Million for Africa’s EbonyLife TV. TR: In the University, I completed a PhD in physics and now, I have a job as an analyst for Bloomberg in the clean energy sector. For me, Film started as a hobby. I had no formal training for it. I started out as an amateur and I experimented with different things, really for my own personal satisfaction. However, my skills built slowly but surely and it began to snowball to the point where I am today where it is not just a hobby but also a second job. People may find it strange that I have come into a creative career from a science and energy background, but I actually don’t see it as a disadvantage at all. Film-making is a process that requires a lot of different skills, particularly if you’re a small operation; some of them creative, some of them technical and some of them more related to management and business. In fact if I ever have children and they tell me they want to get into the creative world, I will advise them to pursue a more business or science orientated career and study path. If they are really passionate and talented on the creative side they will still end up doing that one way or another, but they will have some core skills that would allow them to survive in that world more than their contemporaries. CN: How did Cinema Kpatakpata start out? TR: I have been friends with Kenneth Gyang since 2006 when we met at the Berlinale Talent Campus in Germany. This was a workshop for selected young film-makers to learn new skills and make new friends for future collaborations which, looking back, is exactly what we did. Kenneth is a convincing guy and I am bad at saying no so bit by bit, he managed to get me to work with him – first just by getting me to come to Nigeria and after that, to form a company with our friend Yinka Edward and work on a script for the film that would eventually be Confusion Na Wa. KG: My meeting Tom in Berlin led to a lot of discussions about independent film-making and we found out that we agree on so many creative levels. Coming back to Nigeria, Tom and I stayed in touch with very long and funny emails and whenever I talk to him about a film idea I am thinking of treating, he would research them out without my knowledge and send me a whole pile of materials to read. For a Physics PhD student, he is quite knowledgeable about film. The more he made those researches, the more he was pushing our friendship from ordinary to professional. It was like the guy was really drawn and fascinated about making films in Nigeria. That pushed us into forming this company and right now it is in its third year in existence. CN: What inspired the name, “Cinema Kpatakpata”? TR: When we were working on the script for Confusion Na Wa, Kenneth and I would both work on scenes and then go over what the other had written. At the start of a phone conversation Kenneth had written OC Ukeje’s character says “Oga kpatakpata”. I had never seen this word before and I had no idea how to pronounce it or what it meant, but on the page it just looked so interesting. Kenneth explained it to me, and I was like, “That’s what we should call our company, just so we have a name that white people don’t know how to pronounce!” I didn’t really appreciate that such a logic would backfire on me, but lo and behold I still can’t pronounce that word properly. CN: You’ve won awards and recognition with your movie and short video clips, how does that make you feel? KG: The African Movie Academy Awards is the biggest and most glamorous film awards show in Africa and we wanted to start at that high level. If you look at how the lives and careers of former AMAA winners and especially those who held aloft the Best Film of the Year prize changed after winning, you have to say it is an event you truly need to win. The fairy tale of Djo Munga’s Viva Riva and a host of other filmmakers like Wanuri (From a Whisper) started from the AMAAs made us excited waking up the next morning and realizing what feat we had achieved with Confusion Na Wa. After AMAA, the film went on to win five major awards at the Best of Nollywood Awards and the second big prize in the Narrative Feature category at the Pan African Film Festival in LA amongst other awards within and outside Africa. On a personal level, it was really exciting crowning the year winning The Future Africa Prize in Arts and Culture and honored by the government of Nigeria as one of 100 Guardians of the Future. CN: With your movie and short video clips, it seems like there are particular impressions of Nigeria and her people you want to leave your audience with. Can you explain to us what these impressions are? KG: Generally in any work of Art that is worth its salt, people are supposed to interpret it from their own point of view, so of course I won’t try to water down the interpretation of my film’s messages towards just a single channel.  Basically though, I love telling people about how we are all connected in this country and of course Africa as a whole. I am a very political person so you will always find hidden political messages in my film. Some are not hidden; they are out there for everyone to see. The Lion King sequence in Confusion Na Wa has been hailed as a great piece of African Cinema and I think if you’re fortunate to catch our TV series, you might experience much more of those connotations and insinuations. CN: What do you look for when choosing scripts for production? TR: Well, let me just say this. Me and Kenneth are both writers. I would go further and say we are both good writers and Kenneth is also a great director. For me, writing is the most fun part of the process. We got into the business side as a way of allowing ourselves to express ourselves creatively. I am not saying we don’t like the business side, but it’s a lot of work and our motivation for doing it is so that we can realise our creative visions. So, when someone comes along saying they have a script and wants to know if we will produce it, to be honest with you, it’s not that appealing. They are effectively saying, “How about you guys do all that work but this time, it is for my creative vision”. Why would we want to do that before one of our own works? Especially if it’s someone starting out, I find myself wondering why they cannot push themselves to do what we did and hustle. This answer might sound arrogant but if you look at it from our point of view, you might understand that unless the person approaching us with a script is exceptional, there is no reason we would be interested. We worked so hard to get to where we are to allow ourselves to grow and express ourselves creatively. So, when someone is then expecting us to hand all the opportunities we have created for ourselves over to them, to us, it is a no-no. KG: To be honest, before embarking on any project, I play the whole script in the cinema hall buried in my head. It does not stop there. It goes all the way to post production and the sort of way people will receive it. If I do not see all of that in my head in a positive light then I know it is probably a project not worth touching. I read a lot of things concerning African cinema and how people interpret the works of Ousmane Sembene, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gaston Kabore, Idrissa Ouedraogo etc. I always want to be classed amongst those elites and that keeps me motivated. They made thought-provoking films. I always make sure that the scripts I select are thought provoking and entertaining. Entertainment for me is vital in passing out messages. CN: What is your favorite movie of all time and why? TR: So hard to say. The big irony of being a film-maker is that you don’t get much time to watch movies. I love Monsters Inc; believe it or not, such a beautiful and creative story with such fun characters. I often get into long arguments with people about whether it’s better than Finding Nemo or Toy Story and for me there is no contest but I always wind up getting shouted down. But I still stick to my guns. CN: What is your perception of Nollywood? KG: The film industry here has greatly improved because we have seen that films coming out in the last few years have been outstanding. Initially you could only point out to just a few quality productions but these days there are so many to pick out of the crowd. I would say we have a lot of talents here even though some people think we don’t, I don’t always buy into their argument because I have seen and worked with a lot super talented people whether as crew members operating behind the screen or in front of it. I had this funny experience in London during the Olympics. I was in a workshop at Upton Park where a Nigerian in Diaspora kept ramming it into everyone’s ear that there are no talented actors. She had come to shoot a short film in Nigeria and she had to train them. When I heard her, I confronted her and insisted that was not true because I have worked and seen a lot of talented actors and she cannot say that in a country with so much talent, the ones she trained for her short film was automatically a pointer to how the film industry is in Nigeria. I pulled up the show reel of one of the actors and showed them and a writer there who had gotten a huge grant to make a play of hers into film instantly sent the show reel to her producers. A couple of weeks later, that actor was on his way to UK to star in that film. For me, that sums up the whole argument. There are talents everywhere and the industry is on the rise and rise everyday! What have been your achievements so far? TR: Well, winning awards at AMAA, Best of Nollywood and the Pan African Film Festival were all huge for me. I would love to say that making loads of money from the film was also a great achievement but that has yet to happen! Ask me again in six months and maybe I will have a different story to tell. We also have a sitcom we have produced for EbonyLife called How I Made My First Million which should be coming out soon. It is completely different from Confusion Na Wa and the challenges involved were very different. But it is a lot of fun and I am really proud of that too. What challenges did you face starting out? KG: I have experienced lots of difficulties with people thinking I am too young to handle anything and some thinking that because I come from the other side of the River Niger bridge (which, geographically, is termed Northern Nigeria), one is not as smart as they are, so they always want to treat you as such. I have never gone out of my way trying to prove a point to anyone. What I know is what I know and believe me, it is a lot better than average so to be asked to prove myself at every given opportunity is a huge challenge. On locations, I hear stories of actors looking down on the filmmakers they work with so it is always good to do your homework in order to gain the confidence of the people you are working with because once they consider you clueless for a fraction of a second, some might take advantage of it. So, yes there are challenges but there are always ways to deal with them. CN: What’s your long term vision for Cinema Kpatakpata? What would it be known for five years from now? TR: We just want to carry on doing what we’re doing; hopefully in a more structured way than what we’ve done so far which I would just consider to be our first few steps. We are learning, we’re getting smarter at the business side and we’re improving creatively. I want us to carry on down that road and build something that we and everyone connected to us can be proud of.