This summer, the industry was stunned by the sudden passing of the dynamic writer-director and novelist Biyi Bandele (Dir. Half of a Yellow Sun, Fifty, Fela Kuti – Father of Afrobeat, Blood Sisters). My personal memory of Biyi is of a gentle, thoughtful creative who was completely in awe of filmmaking as a form of artistic expression.
When I interviewed him in 2014 for my book The Nigerian Filmmaker’s Guide to Success: Beyond Nollywood he admitted that growing up he ‘didn’t think [he] wanted to be a filmmaker’ but after a few years in London he changed his mind after getting ‘tired and fed up of working with directors who would direct things’ [he] wrote’ with ’results [he] did not recognise’.
Few people know that prior to Half of a Yellow Sun, Biyi had been secretly making short films for years, teaching himself the craft.
Biyi described his own personal film tastes as ‘Catholic’, revealing that as a young adult he really loved wa
Black Film Bulletin, December 2022
tching ‘real serious cult, arthouse movies’. The person who made the most significant ideological impression him was Fela Anikulapo Kuti stating ‘his influence on me was primarily to do with the way he worked. He practiced, he rehearsed virtually every day’.
Of the Nigerian film industry, he predicted that ‘many more movies crossing over, speaking to many more people internationally. The positive reviews that his final film The Kings Horsemen have received would certainly suggest so.
Biyi Bandele will be fondly remembered as one of Africa’s greatest artists.
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