Ify Arinze had no plan to go into filmmaking. At least initially. Born to a dad who passed on early and a mum who worked in immigration, she left Lagos for the US in 2010, planning to study biochemistry—“just like Ben Carson”—and on to med school. Her plan was similar to the plans of many immigrants before her: she wanted to “make my family proud”.
Somehow, she discovered neuroscience and decided to study it at a college for women. That became her first degree not biochemistry. Outside of class, she discovered photography and got good enough to get gigs to cover weddings. When she graduated, she took up a job at the University of Massachusetts and then moved to Michigan. At this point, medicine remained in her future but again, something else intervened: she wanted to go to film school. Unlike the move biochemistry to neuroscience, the move to film had to be trickier, so she spoke to a few people in her orbit who had made the tranistion. These were mainly engineers. Subsequently, she found out that she needed to submit a video sample as part of her application.
Arinze arranged a ragtag crew of friends to make a short film. “It was very DIY,” she says over Google Meet. “YouTube was my teacher.”
The result of that hustle was “Cooking with My Mum”, the story of a girl who has forgotten how to cook jollof rice and has to reach out to her mum for help ahead of hosting a party at her new home. The first-time director loved the experience and decided to do another short. She put both films in her applications to five schools, NYU and Columbia in Chicago among them. “I didn’t have too high expectations,” she says. “I was just proud of myself of having done it.”
Well, low expectations be damned. She got offers from both Columbia and NYU. “It felt like validation,” she says. “Sometimes you think ‘I’m just following my instincts’ and then you get this external affirmation.”
She chose NYU. The school had offered a substantial scholarship but, she adds, it still was stressful to come with the rest of the cash for her education. She eventually spent five years instead of the official three years, mostly because of the pandemic. This wasn’t a problem. “You don’t pay tuition for the last two years and you are making work while you are in the programme,” she says.
At NYU, she met Spike Lee; he’s the artistic director of the programme. She also met Casey Lemmons, Alex Rockwell, Chloe Zhao, and Charlotte Wells. I ask her if Nollywood came up while she was there and she says not really. But Chuko Esiri, half of the Esiri Brothers, the pair behind the acclaimed Eymiofe, came up a few times. He is an NYU grad. When Nollywood did come up, it was because of her nationality. How familiar is Arinze herself with the industry? Quite familiar, she says, although that’s because of childhood sessions with her grandmother.
“We would always watch films together,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Ini Edo was her favourite.”
***
One of Arinze’s popular shorts is Breastmilk. It was her thesis film and was based on a short story by her friend Pemi Aguda. “It felt so vivid that I thought ‘I’d love to make this into a film’.” She got Aguda’s permission and returned to Nigeria to shoot it. She had wanted to be on set for five days shooting Breastmilk but saw that her crew members, already used to Nigerian productions, said they should be done in one day. Even now, Arinze seems amused, if mildly aghast, at the idea. “We are not making that type of film,” she told them. A negotiation followed and finally she was on set for four days.
That was years ago. Arinze has since written a feature, which took her to a filmmaking programme in Mexico, to the Berlinale Talents’ Script Station, and to the Locarno Residency. The feature project is currently titled Scruples, and the idea came after a conversation with Aguda in which they mulled the absence of proper boarding school films set in Nigeria. Aguda, who seems like Arinze’s muse, suggested that Arinze writes such a film. The resulting story, a “vomit draft” as she calls it, is based on memories and experiences of her time as a pupil in Queens’ College, Lagos. “The story didn’t have much shape, so my work over the past five years has been finding the shape and structure, and also [to give it] a beginning, middle, and end.”
The story covers the power and class dynamics at a girls’ secondary school through the eyes of a student who becomes enamoured of the institution’s head girl. She becomes a “less ethical version of herself” until the near-death experience of a close friend forces a reckoning. I tell Arinze that the synopsis shared by Locarno hinted at a queer relationship between the girls at the centre of the story. Arinze shrugs and says she doesn’t think Scruples is “explicitly queer”. “There’s a fine line between liking somebody so much that you can’t tell if you want to be them or be with them,” she adds.
What is certain is the film would explore class differences between two girls at a secondary school in Nigeria.
For Arinze, those three days in Switzerland were a “whirlwind”. She pitched on one day, had meetings with the Locarno jury on the second, and then, on the last day, she attended an event where three winning projects were announced. Arinze was winner of the grand prize. The win came with a cash prize of CHF5,000, a yearlong script mentorship, a trip to Venice, another to the south of France, and finally a trip back to Locarno for a presentation where she’d give a progress report. In the time it has taken this interview to be published, these activities must have come to an end. At the time she wasn’t sure when the film will be ready for the public but she gave 2027 as the year she intends to start shooting.
One reason for the length of time it will take is Arinze’s unhurried mode of working. Another is logistical. Given that the film involves kids in school, shooting has to be during a long vacation. In the meantime, Arinze says she’s seeking grants while working in New York, teaching high school students documentary filmmaking.
***
Arinze is aware that she is emerging as a filmmaker in a season where Nigerian filmmakers are showing up at the biggest film stages. CJ Obasi showed Mami Wata in Sundance, Akinola Davies Jnr premiered My Father’s Shadow in Cannes, the Esiri brothers had Eyimofe in Berlin, and Damilola Orimogunje will screen his latest, Dear Ajayi, at one of the parallel sections of Venice. It’s a great time to be a Nigerian making movies targeting an international audience. Pressed a bit on where she would like to see Scruples premiere, she laughs somewhat nervously as though she doesn’t want any of her dream venues to get jealous. “You are putting me in a tough spot,” she says, pauses, and goes off the record.
“I want it to be celebrated and I want it to be seen,” she says finally, laughing at her reluctance to make her dreams public.
As the interview winds down, I ask Arinze if she thinks of herself as a Nollywood filmmaker. In response, she accuses me of asking a trick question. She says she was raised on a “Nollywood die” but she continues, “I think of myself as a Nigerian filmmaker because the way I like to make work may not be conducive to Nollywood based on the experience I had shooting Breastmilk and hearing how things are done. I move much slower.” I am not sure if she has answered the question so I ask how she feels about Nigeria’s mainstream in contemporary times. “You are trying to put me in trouble,” she says and doesn’t answer.
She is, however, happy to name Djibril Diop Mambety and Sembene. For African filmmakers who are alive, she doesn’t name the directors but mentions two films: This Is Not A Burial, It Is A Resurrection and On Becoming A Guinea Fowl.
Her models for execution are not any of those films. For her, the models are the works of Lucretia Martel and Hirokazu Kore-eda. “My voice as a filmmaker is a lot quieter,” she says. “It is not melodramatic—which is not to say that melodramatic things don’t have a place—but when I saw Hirokazu Koreada’s work I saw that the stakes are quite high but the tone is quieter and more poetic. That’s where my films tend to live: in the quiet, and in the poetic, and in the intimate.”
