We look at the future through cinema and A.I

We've been brunching and watching the future of Nollywood with Indieview Lagos

Feb 20

If you follow the independent film circuit in Lagos then you’ve heard of Indieview. They host screenings of cult independent or foreign cinema that otherwise wouldn’t get a theatrical release here in Nigeria, or open their platform up to young Nigerian independent filmmakers making short films or indie-features.

When we heard that they were looking to host another short film festival, we came onboard and partnered with them to help enrich the experience by bringing in food and other kinds of entertainment. Film festivals can get very serious and we wanted to keep the mood light and fun, so we held the festival outdoors in the BICS garden, in Lekki Phase One. It didn’t hurt that our view from the garden was directly overlooking the Lekki-Ikoyi Bridge.

We had a cute little backdrop for photos, an impressive offering of food and drinks, and just space to move around and get acquainted with other guests before the screenings actually started. We showed a couple of films well into the evening as film lovers and couples looking for a different kind of experience got sucked into the brilliant worlds created by our talented roster of exhibiting filmmakers. On our roster was ‘Gbese’ by Adesola Oni, ‘Boo’d Up’ by Gold Gerry, ‘Green: The Amazons’ by Oluchi Mary Nsofor, Adeniyi Joseph (TAJ) with ‘Kill The Impostor’ and Orobosa Ikponmwen with ‘BODMAS Short Film, Encores & Fireworks.’.

We can’t wait to get back with Indieview Lagos for the next one.

At Cocoa House, we care about the arts. But we don’t just care about the finished product, the films, music, visual arts and theatre that entertain us and tell our stories. We also care about the people who create the art that we watch, engage and listen to, and the process that brought their ideas to life.

If we were going to organise a film festival, it only made sense that we’d take out some time to learn about the filmmakers behind the projects on our roster and the process to making their innovative films. So in partnership with Indieview Lagos, we organised our first filmmaker’s roundtable.

Our roundtable this year featured Adeniyi Joseph Omobulejo (Taj) who released the meta-drama ‘Kill the Impostor’ in October 2022, Oluchi Mary Nsofor released a number of projects in the year, including ‘The Amazons’ which followed the lives of 5 Nigerian athletes. The roundtable was rounded out by Orobosa Ikponmwen who produced ‘Kali and Mimi: The Mathletes’, Gold Gerry who directed ‘Boo’d Up’ and Adesola Oni who wrote and directed ‘Gbese’.

Get acquainted with these rising stars here.

THE FUTURE AS PREDICTED BY A.I?

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2023 is an interesting year. It’s 22 years after the events of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 3 year after the events of the original Blade Runner which predicted we’d had figured out how to make clones, androids and cyborgs, one year year George Jetson of the wildly popular 80’s sci-fi the Jetsons, was born and 5 years before Skynet (from terminator) takes over the earth.

The promises these sci-fi shows and films made about the future haven’t exactly panned out the way they imagined, but we are way more advanced technologically than they could have imagined for themselves in the 60’s and 70’s. Who would have thought that A.I, the ultra-expensive technology that was once only available to the innovation labs of tech corporations, would end up being used to create art, cheat on tests and ‘predict’ the future. New applications for A.I get announced everyday but the buzziest A.I powered tools being used right now are semi-sentient chat bots like Chat GPT and A.I image generation apps that work using text or image prompts like Dawn AI and Mid.Journey.

We took one of these image generation A.I apps and fed it a number of predictive text prompts to see what it would cough up. We threw in all sorts of combinations there from urban legends like Madam Koi-koi to a ‘non-problematic Nigerian woman’. See the results for yourself.