Exciting new challenge saw Terry working in Nigeria
The latest project on which Mullingar filmmaker Terry McMahon has been working has seen him back and forthing to Nigeria, where he has been directing a film that tells a tale very much of our time.
“A schoolgirl collapses, and her teacher’s life-saving intervention is reframed as sexual assault, and now it’s his life on the line,” Terry explains.
Written and produced by Leke Akinrowo and starring some of Nigeria’s best-known actors, ‘The Kiss of Death’ is now in post-production, and then will start the process of getting it entered in the film festival circuit in the hope that it will build a reputation and thus work its way into movie theatres.
Says Terry: “To me, the value of the piece and the power of the piece and the reason I’m compelled by it – even though it’s a story set in Kanu, which is in northern Nigeria – is due to the universality of the story, which is that we’re living in a time where the deliberate misrepresentation of reality has become a political weapon, a social weapon, a personal weapon, and increasingly, not only do we not know what reality is, but we’re seeing reality moulded in front of us in a malicious way – and we seem powerless to do anything about it.”
Terry admits to having initially been daunted at the thought of directing a film in such an unfamiliar world: “I was half-terrified and half-excited,” he says, but he is proud of the result: “Every day we made something happen; every day we changed everything to make something impossible happen. As I said to the crew and the cast, making a film is the equivalent of going to war against the impossible. And somehow we have at the end of it, a strange, powerful little film that has an undercurrent that is undeniable.”
He loved the whole experience of being in Nigeria, commenting too that as a white man in an area where there were no other white people, he got a real sense, for the first time in his life, of what it is like to be ‘the other’.
It also gave him another perspective on racism: he got used to being referred to as ‘oyinbo’ (white man). “They would literally point and go ‘white man’.
“But there were children there who had never seen a white person and they were fascinated – touched my skin and my hair and all that kind of stuff.
“And it’s amazing because we talk so much about ‘racism’ and racism has become such a political weapon, and such a tool of manipulation.
But very often what we call ‘racism’ is simply a naively inarticulate curiosity about the different other.”
“And to see yourself being, in a reductive way, defined by your skin colour – but then in an extraordinary embrace; for your skin colour to be the beginning of a conversation about a common humanity [was how it was].
“And again, and again, that was the experience.”
Terry loved the excitement of Nigeria; the vibrancy, the friendliness: “At the risk of sounding trite, the hospitality, the embrace, the love I was shown again and again and again, has blown my mind and it was a life-changing, life-enhancing experience.”