‘He asked me what I did sexually with a woman’: How Joy Garuru-Akpogutor turned her interrogation in Asylum into a film | film

COye Garoro-Akpogotor was a little confused as she took to the stage after the screening of her debut feature film, Dreamers, at the London Film Festival. The Nigerian-British director’s film is a love story set in an immigration detention centre. It actually premiered in Berlin earlier this year. But screening her semi-autobiographical film to a local audience in London was a revelation. “I suddenly had this feeling: Oh my God, everyone can see me. Everyone knows everything about me.” She laughs.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has earned a reputation as a rising star producer. Her company Joi Productions makes films that tell black, female, and queer stories. (“All of the above, sometimes individually.”) Her credits include Rapman’s Blue Story and Amal Amin’s romantic comedy Boxing Day, and she’s currently working on Ashley Walters’ directorial debut Animol.

We’re talking via video call at the end of a long work day. Behind her on a shelf are cardboard boxes labeled with movie project titles, neatly labeled with a Sharpie marker. Within five minutes you can see why directors choose Gharoro-Akpojotor to produce their films. She takes her work seriously, but laughs a lot at herself – and has such an air of calm that even the end of the world won’t bother her.

Dreamers is inspired by her own experience seeking asylum in the United Kingdom when she was 25 years old. It tells the story of Esiu (Ronke Adekolojo), a Nigerian woman held in a deportation center while the Home Office decides whether or not to believe she is who she says she is – a lesbian whose life would be in danger if she is returned to Nigeria.

“I always say the film is loosely based on my life,” says Garuru-Akpogotor. She herself has not experienced the trauma that is her character’s traumatic backstory. She was not detained while her asylum application was being processed, although that was difficult. “My immigration lawyer said it was 50/50.” The night before her appointment, Garoro-Akpogotor held a going-away party with friends. “Because we weren’t sure I would come back. The next morning I took the bus at six o’clock to Croydon.” After her fingerprints were taken and her passport was handed over, she was allowed to leave.

But some scenes in the film, in which Ezio is interviewed by a Ministry of Interior social worker, are practically literal, Garuru-Akpogotor says. Before her interview, her legal aid lawyer advised her to take a copy of her written statement. “She told me the Home Office hates reading. They won’t read it.”

Her lawyer wasn’t wrong. “When I got there, the caseworker had not read it. He knew nothing about where I was coming from. He knew nothing about my condition. He had not read anything I sent him. However, after 202 questions, he was going to make the decision on whether I would stay or not.”

The interview included some remarkably ill-considered questions. “The social worker asked me: Is there a Brighton in Nigeria?”

Was he wondering if Nigeria had a gay-friendly city you could live in? “Yes! Then he asked, ‘Well, if your family is in the south and they know you’re gay, why can’t you go to the north?'” Jaroro Akpogutor explained to him that in many northern states in Nigeria, Islamic law criminalizes homosexual activities. The maximum punishment is death.

Next came an interrogation about her sex life. “He said to me: Tell me the name of a gay bar in London… What did you do sexually with a woman?… What did you do sexually with a man?” Then at the end of the interview, “How do I know you’re not straight?”

Garoro-Akpogotor considers herself one of the lucky ones. She was warned that a decision on her asylum application could take years. But five days later, a letter arrived on the door mat; Her request was approved. She has a hunch that her relationship with the Dagenham caseworker had something to do with it. She worked at a betting shop in Dagenham, and it turned out the person in charge of the case was from there. “We spent a lot of time talking about Dagenham. I think that was a privilege for me because we were able to find that connection. But a lot of people don’t have that.”

In “Dreamers”, he depicts the bleakness and bureaucratic indifference of immigration to the United Kingdom. A system that treats people without listening to them or looking them in the eye. This does not take into account trauma. But it’s not a dark film. There are female friendships, and a wonderful love story between Esiu and another woman in the detention center, Farah (Anne Akengerin). The screenplay skillfully challenges stereotypes about refugees. Between them, Ecio and Farah have degrees in politics and philosophy, and bicker over Karl Marx. The film, like its director, is funny and warm.

We meet before the government announces its proposals to make sweeping new changes to the asylum system, which could include making refugee status temporary. But I asked Garoro Akpogotor what she thought of the recent protests against hotels housing asylum seekers. “I feel like the protests are in the wrong place,” Answers says. “These guys who came, they didn’t make any of the rules. They didn’t make any of the policies. If anything, you should be at No. 10 protesting. That’s where the rules are made.”

When Garuru-Akpogotor’s father was a child in Nigeria, he worked for Shell. Growing up, she loved telling stories and wrote a book in her bedroom when she was 11 years old. “Well, I say book…” she said, smiling. “I think it was called The Vampire Busters. My teacher told my mother I could become an author.” Her mother was having none of it. “She said, ‘There’s no money for that! My daughter is going to be an English teacher.’

After her father’s death, Garoro-Akpojotor’s mother sent her three siblings to the United Kingdom to boarding school. I followed her when she was sixteen. After moving to London, she discovered films. Every week, Garuru-Akpogotor and her companion would buy two cinema tickets for the price of one: “We would get a ticket and then stay in the cinema and watch movies in a row. I would say: ‘Oh my God, I love the cinema.’”

At the same time, she was thinking about her sex life. “I always knew I liked women, but I never really understood it.” In Nigeria, she couldn’t do anything about her feelings. “Now I thought maybe I should watch more gay cinema, to understand what it means to be black, gay and Nigerian. But I couldn’t find anything to watch.” It sparked an idea: “What if I could make it myself? And that’s where my journey began. I just wanted to see myself on screen.”

Gharoro-Akpojotor wrote her first script while doing her A levels. It was a murder mystery involving characters high on mushrooms. I studied film at university, which wasn’t the degree I thought I’d get into. “Admittedly, I thought it was a more hands-on course,” she says with a smile. But at university I learned about cinema. Watching the films of Wong Kar-wai, François Truffaut and Ousmane Sembène, the world becomes bigger. “I learned that art is an expression of yourself. The French New Wave taught me that. It’s an expression of who you are as a person. That was something I was trying to do with Dreamers, to find myself in it.”

After university, her mother advised her to get a reasonable job at the BBC. “But I always felt like I needed to try harder.” She worked part-time in a betting shop while studying for her master’s part-time, and made short films.

While filming the short film, an actor told her that she had a talent for producing. And I liked that too. “I enjoyed the organizational part, I enjoyed talking to people. I enjoyed seeing the movie together.” I’ve got her thinking. “What stories do I want to put out in the world? I need to find things that speak to me, that make me feel good as a human being. I need to feel like I’m offering something. I really wanted to make films that allow others to see and hear themselves on screen.”

She achieved just that with her first feature film, Blue Story. It was a drama about two friends who fall into the trap of gangs from rival postcodes in south London, directed by rapper Rapman. Blue Story had the sixth best opening for any British film during 2019: “There were people in the audience who went to see it again and again.”

She then became embroiled in controversy, after a brawl in a cinema lobby in Birmingham. Two cinema chains pulled the film from screens, leading to accusations of “institutional racism”. Movie theaters declined rapidly. At the time, Garuru-Akpogotor said she did not understand why she was banned. “It’s an anti-violence film. The film was about calling young people to question why they joined gangs. I think we felt a little demonized.”

What she wants more than anything is to make films that challenge people to see the world differently. Her next project is about a young man struggling with mental health issues. “By the end of this, I want you to be like, next time you see a guy on the road, and you hear him screaming, take time to think. We’re used to walking. We treat people like other people. It’s the same with immigration — it’s those guys over there. We forget the human ties that bind us all together. I think it’s about empathy.”

She laughs. “It seems like I’m kind of like a sticky note. But I really believe that if we had more understanding of social issues, we would have more care for each other.”