Imagine This, an award-winning book by Sade Adeniran, is being developed into a feature film. Adeniran made the revelation at an interview on the #BlackWomenFilmmakersSpeak Series of Shadow and Act which she shared on her Twitter page @Imagine_This on Tuesday.
The novel was awarded the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in Africa. It was also shortlisted for the Books To Talk About award of the World Book Day.
Adeniran is rewriting the novel into a script for the film. Her script made it into the second round of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab; it also won the British Urban Film Festival Award for Best Script Talent.
She 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.”
The UK-based author was born to Nigerian parents and spent her formative years living with her grandmother in Idogun, Ondo State, before going to the UK where she acquired degrees in Media and English from Plymouth University.
Imagine This is her first book. Her inability to find a publisher forced her to self-publish in 2008, after which she created a successful marketing campaign to sell the books which have gotten her critical acclaim internationally.
She is also a trained and experienced filmmaker with five short films to her credit, and another film Two Weddings’ which is currently in the works. Speaking about her career in as a filmmaker, she said, “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.”
She will be involved in the new adapted feature film both as scriptwriter and producer.
Feature image: goodreads.com