 |
Cooperation: German Premiere "Half of a Yellow Sun”
.
Event information
| Potsdamer Str. 2 10785 Berlin |
.
The adaptation by Biyi Bandele of Chimamanda Adichie’s bestselling novel is a sweeping romantic drama about two sisters and their lovers, who get sweeped into the Nigerian Biafra war. The film which was acclaimed internationally and is set to release in Nigeria in August, is a powerful, intensely emotional and, as the response of readers around the world has shown, it is a story which can touch everyone’s heart.
Synopsis
Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) are glamorous twins from a wealthy Nigerian family. Returning to a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria after their expensive English education, the two women make very different choices. Olanna shocks her family by going to live with her lover, the “revolutionary professor” Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his devoted houseboy Ugwu (John Boyega) in the dusty university town of Nsukka; Kainene turns out to be a fiercely successful businesswoman when she takes over the family interests, and surprises herself when she falls in love with Richard (Joseph Mawle), an English writer. Preoccupied by their romantic entanglements, and a betrayal between the sisters, the events of their life loom larger than politics. However, they become caught up in the events of the Nigerian civil war, in which the lgbo people fought an impassioned struggle to establish Biafra as an independent republic, ending in chilling violence which shocked the entire country and the world.
Press Reviews
"Superb performances" Variety
"An epic and striking adaptation… Powerful and moving performances" Screen Daily
"The film is gorgeous, evocative and easily the highlight of Newton’s achievement as an actress” Vanity Fair
"A brilliant directing debut” Huffington Post
“Shocking, energetic and wallop packing” The Hollywood Reporter
“Arresting and devastating in equal parts” Glamour
“A nuanced historical epic” Total Film
“Spectacular” Flavour Mag
The Director: Biyi Bandele
Biyi Bandele was born in Nigeria in 1967 and lives in London since 1990. He has become known as a prolific playwright, novelist and screenwriter who already looks back at a distinguished career writing and directing plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court, and writing screenplays for the BBC and British and international film productions. His plays are: Rain; Marching for Fausa (1993); Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994); Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys (published in one volume, 1995). Brixton Stories, his acclaimed stage adaptation of his own novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001, and was published in one volume with his play, Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999. Bandele’s fiction writing includes Burma Boy published by Jonathan Cape in 2007; The Street, Picador, 1999; The Sympathetic Undertaker & Other Dreams, Heinemann, 1994; and The Man Who Came In From The Back Of Beyond, Heinemann, 1993. In 1997 he adapted Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the stage, and in 1999 wrote a new adaptation of Aphra Benn’s Oroonoko, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2009, Bandele wrote and directed his first short film THE KISS (2009), a psychological thriller. HALF OF A YELLOW SUN is Biyi Bandele’s feature film directorial debut.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her novel Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The Thing Around Your Neck, her collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in Africa. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she was named one of the twenty most important fiction writers today under 40 years old by The New Yorker. Her latest novel, Americanah, was published in 2013; Dave Eggers called it “[a] moving intergenerational epic that confirms Adichie’s virtuosity, boundless empathy and searing social acuity.”
In cooperation and in the framework of AFRIKAMRA. See www.afrikamera.de