Yo… It seems my last blog entry got some of y’all a bit worried for me! I appreciate the outpouring of concern, but I’m alright, folks… I’m not depressed (no more than usual, anyway) and I’m not about to off myself or anything. Shoot… If anything, this experience has opened my eyes to levels of inner strength and stick-to-itivity that I never even realized I possessed. Plus, I think I’ve felt generally happier and more at peace this past month and change in Naija than I’ve been in ages and I’m seriously considering at the possibility of relocating here on at least a semi-permanent basis.
Yes, times are kinda hard on the boulevard, but the fact is that this thing has been an uphill battle from Day Zero. We’ve never let it phase us then and we’re not about to start doing so now. I wish I could tell you how many times me, Denis and Koko have been sitting in our room, sharing a single bottle of Fanta, so broke that we couldn’t even afford a phone call or a roll of toilet paper and wondering how the hell we are gonna manage another day of shooting… and someone says “We are gonna laugh so hard at this one day” and someone else says “One day? Dude, we’re laughing right now, aren’t we?”
How many times have we firmly decided “This is the end of the road. We have to stop now. It’s the only sane thing. We must shut down this production immediately”* and the next day, some new miracle emerges that allows us to continue for another few days?
We are gonna finish this movie. And it’s going to be good.
And even if we don’t, I’m gonna make sure I spin something out of this whole experience… I’ll turn it into an African filmmaker version of The Broke Diaries or a book about youth and young manhood or I’ll put out a collection of photographs or something (I’m already thinking of doing a photo essay featuring every man, woman and child I see wearing 50 Cent T-shirts in various Nigerian cities).
My heart melted when I read all the support that you guys offered, though… Believe me, charity usually embarrasses me, but the time for pride is well past.
(In fact, I’m even thinking of emailing that United Children's Fund dude who appeals to white/western guilt to help poor Africans like us. I mean, if a thousand people chip in 70 cents a day for the next week, we’re all good, right?)
Yes, donations are quite welcome, and they mean a lot to us. I don’t want to mention the amount that we need to finish right now, but even though it seems like a lot in African terms, it’s really a bullshit amount in American/European money. So every little bit helps.
If you got a Paypal account, you can send money to takestyle@hotmail.com. If you don’t fuck with Paypal like that, you can email eemesih@hotmail.com or kuntual@mac.com to make alternate arrangements. Just put “TOO MUCH MONEY!” in the subject line (that phrase is a running joke amongst our crew).
Words can’t express my gratitude… I’ll make it up to you all somehow… Maybe I’ll come to your city and clean your apartment for you or something.
Anyway, I promised that I would return to blogging in full force and I was able to write some stuff over the past couple of days since we’re currently on hiatus, kinda (We’ll be back in business tomorrow, though). I originally made a jumbo-sized bumper post covering the past couple of days, but I’ll break it down into more readable chunks over the next couple of days. I apologize for the intensely navel-gazing, depressive tenor of some of the material… This is what happens to my mind when I have too much free time on my hands.
*Koko would want me to state explicitly that at no point has he ever advocated, cosigned, endorsed or supported the possibility of stopping. Ever.
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