Confusion Na Wa directed by Kenneth Gyang (review)

Confusion Na Wa is great fun to watch—a blast of fresh, keen air in Nigerian filmmaking and out of the ordinary in several dimensions. It comes from Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Violence in Jos, where the director, Kenneth Gyang, lives, shifted the production to Kaduna. Its two big stars, Ali Nuhu (from the Hausa film industry) and Ramsey Nouah (from Nollywood), appeal to Nigeria’s cinematic north and south, while the ambience is that of the complex cultural mosaic of the country’s center. The film is full of new talent: other members of the uniformly excellent cast are relatively unknown, as are Gyang, who is also the cowriter and coproducer, and Tom Rowlands-Rees, who produced and cowrote. (The director of photography, Yinka Edward, the third member of the production company, has shot several films for the leading directors Kunle Afolayan and Izu Ujukwu; he was a classmate of Gyang’s at the National Film Institute in Jos.) The production is strikingly young in its personnel, subject, and outlook, and it springs from a novel constellation of resources and strategies. It grew out of the friendship of Gyang and Rowlands-Rees, an Englishman with a family connection to Nigeria, and was funded by a €20,000 grant from the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Unlike most “New Nollywood” films, which rely on relatively high budgets and production values, massed star power, and patronage from expatriate Nigerians and cinemagoers at the new elite multiplexes in Nigeria, these filmmakers embraced their low budget—very low even by Nollywood standards—to make a film with a grassroots feel that is nevertheless unusually sharp in every aspect of its conception and execution.

Confusion Na Wa (in Pidgin, “na wa” means “wow”) has been warmly received at several international film festivals and also in Nigeria, winning Best Film at the Africa Movie Academy Awards, the most important Nollywood event. Now it is making its way through the unsettled and treacherous Nigerian and international distribution system. (It can be streamed on the pay Website Dobox.tv.) Fortunately, the filmmakers did not have to put up their houses as collateral in the normal New Nollywood way—their willingness to work on a shoestring bought them freedom. The film is a revelation of what can happen in Nigerian filmmaking, showing that there is room for intelligent, edgy experimentation and the sensibility of a new generation, and that hitherto untapped Nigerian cultural resources can be channeled into Nollywood. It’s an important movie, a harbinger.

The charismatic, profane central characters, Charles (O. C. Ukeje) and Chichi (Gold Ikponmwosa), are unemployed youths who steal car stereos to fund their ganja smoking and womanizing. Charles picks up a phone dropped by a businessman named Emeka (Ramsey Nouah) and extorts money from him when text messages show that Emeka is having a steamy extramarital affair with fiery Isabella (Tunde Aladese), who is married to the excessively cautious and mild-mannered office worker Bello (Ali Nuhu). Bello’s manhood is in question, as is the sexuality of teenage Kola (Nathaniel Deme, giving a wonderful, underplayed performance), whose father publishes a newspaper as an outlet for his self-righteous moralizing outrage. Kola’s sister and a girlfriend slip out to a party where the girlfriend is date-raped by Charles, bringing her angry father into the picture. Confusion Na Wa then resolves its jigsaw puzzle of a plot in a neat dramatic climax. Gyang cites the multistranded, coincidence-laden films of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros [2000]; Babel [2006]) as an inspiration.

But the dramatic closure does not entail ideological closure. The film begins and ends with Chichi’s hard-won wisdom: “When I was a boy, they told me everything happens for a reason. But they were wrong. Some things don’t happen for a reason. They just happen.” The film is agnostic and irreverent, and it contradicts the most fundamental principle of Nollywood: that there is a spiritual and moral...