Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim

Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim (born June 7, 1989) is a Nigerian film producer, screenwriter and filmmaker, who creates works which tell the stories of Nigeria's marginalised LGBTQ communities. In 2020, the BBC included her in its list of the 100 Women of the Year. In 2015, she gave a TEDx talk, Becoming Free of the English Box.

Quotes

• Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim: 14 Years and A Day is akin to a coming-of-age story. It’s about Amal who hasn't really experienced queerness in Nigeria because she hasn't lived in Nigeria long enough. She has been in a queer relationship for years, and she’s demanding more from her partner. She wants a relationship that she wouldn’t need to constantly hide and when her partner cannot give her that, she goes out by herself and meets someone. She has an amazing time with this person and who opens her eyes to the possibility of actually having a fulfilling queer life in Nigeria. It's like an awakening for her.
  • [1]
• I think that theme is just a way of keeping the audience grounded in reality. While we as queer people can find community and can find joy, many times we cannot find romantic love. As a woman in her thirties, I find it hard to even find other lesbians in their thirties because many of them are married to men. And so I don't want to focus so much on the joy and then remove the reality that we face.
  • [2]
• In Nigeria, queer people, when we fall in love, we fall in love within closed spaces because we can’t really date outside. It is very symbolic. And I also intentionally try to remove heterosexuals when I'm making a film that’s queer because I just want to center queer people and just close in on them. It's almost like building a world where only queer people exist, without the opinions or judgments of heterosexual folks.
  • [3]
• It was extremely difficult to make because we had significantly less funding than our previous films for a story that included more characters. Bear in mind that we had all these queer and queer-presenting characters, and so we constantly had to maintain a respectful environment on set with regard to people’s pronouns and making sure everyone felt safe.
  • [4]
• I feel like it's that thing that happens when you've been silenced for a long time and you finally gain your voice. I've been working in Nollywood for over ten years, and I know how many times I was shut down when I tried to incorporate queer characters in films. Creating Ìfé blacklisted me and took me off of Nollywood. I even got threatened by a director. After that experience, I had nothing to lose, and I realized I could keep making the films I wanted.
  • [5]