AFRIFF 2024 | Zikoko!

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

This has long been perhaps one of the stupidest yet paradoxical questions of extremely infinitesimal importance. One might bring this up at a moment of weakness, say after the third glass of wine or when we’ve been beaten in a debate. Yet, the wunderkind director, Kunle Afolayan has been asking this question for decades with his film.

The premise of his latest Recall is not dissimilar to many of Afolayan’s works—The Figurine, Irapada, Aníkúlápó—which seek to question the reality of African spirituality.

In Recall, Anita (Sharon Ooja) and Goke (Olarotimi Fakunle) have been married for 10 years. A day after their anniversary, Anita wakes up and has lost all her memories of the last 10 years, including her marriage and her two children. It turns out Anita had only come to fall in love with Goke through juju. But the juju has to be renewed every 10 years for her to stay in love with him. As the film progresses, we realise that Goke is ill-fated by the Gods and could never have found a woman to love him.

To drive home Goke’s status as a kind of untouchable, he has bucked teeth. “I didn’t want a pretty face,” Afolayan said of casting Olarotimi in that role. “We even had to tone him down for him to look not as appealing.”

With this film, Afolayan presents a brash enquiry into the human condition. Are the Gods really the masters of our faith? Does destiny exist? Or are we just all faking it? Is it possible that Goke didn’t find love because he had terrible game, and as Afolayan intended, he was not an appealing man?

Afolayan at the AFRIFF premiere of Recall

What does Afolayan think?

“Look, the world is full of forces beyond the ordinary eyes,” he told Zikoko at the film’s premiere at the 2024 Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF). “But for my part, I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. I don’t do religion. I don’t do any religion. But I have nothing against any religion. I don’t go to church. But if they’re doing it where I am, I don’t mind participating. I’m a freethinker. But I believe there is God.”

With this, the point of the film becomes clearer. Beyond all Goke’s pleas for the woman he loves, all Olarotimi’s crying as him, and the romance between them (for those naive enough to think this director is into that type of thing), Afolayan makes a strong case for how, regardless of what destiny says, for those who believe in that type of thing, we can always pick ourselves up if we work a bit harder at it.

Seeing his family crumble before his eyes and his once loving in-laws, played by Keppy Ekpenyong and Tina Mba, become cold to him, Goke picks up his lover boy hat and fights to have his family back. He becomes a more thoughtful partner and an even more thorough gifter.

The film is as much about African spirituality as it is a sharp commentary on the state of modern Pentecostalism and how Afolayan sees it. Patience Ozokwor makes a cameo in Recall as a powerful prophetess based in Badagry, who has her followers WhatsApp pictures of their loved ones to be prayed on. She is the one that Anita’s mother runs to when the memory loss gets worse and brings the marriage to its untimely end.

If she’s fake or not, Afolayan won’t say. We don’t see how she finds out that Anita has been bewitched. But that is the point. Afolayan does not mind tethering with the powers that be. He acknowledges that there are spiritual forces at play. In the film, he suggests that there might be something amiss in modern-day Nigerian Pentecostalism, and for that reason, perhaps we should be cautious when approaching it because it is a religion before anything else.

At the close of the film, an immense tragedy is about to set in, so the family converges before an Ifa priest in the hope of respite. The Ifa priest is kinder than Ozokwor’s prophetess, who destroys a relationship that would have otherwise made a killing from online shippers. Unlike her, he lays down the repercussions of his solution to the family. They decide if it’s in their best interest. They have a choice, and as he carries out his rituals, this time, Afolayan takes us along. The family is not pleased with the result, so they ask him for more guidance and help. He reminded them they knew the terms even before he started the ritual. They were given a choice.

When I asked Afolayan what he hoped people would take out of Recall, he also wants the audience to have a choice. “I don’t know. They should take whatever they want to take. I’ve done it,” he said.

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For the last two decades that Olarotimi Fakunle has been a working actor, he has played mostly men that our mothers have warned us against; mafia leader in Slum King, conniving drug lord in Gangs of Lagos, no-nonsense mechanic in Omoye. But in the new Kunle Afolayan film Recall, which premiered at the 2024 African Film Festival (ARIFF), Olarotimi has taken up a new role: hotshot lover boy.

“I won’t lie to you; it wasn’t easy,” he told Zikoko at the premiere. “It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my two-decade-plus career. It was challenging because it was a lot of emotional roller coaster. But I’m just so grateful that with the director and other cast members, we were able to pull it off.”

Goke, his character, is madly in love with Anita, played by Sharon Ooja-Nwoke, and she loves him back. But their lives come to a grinding halt after she loses her memory, and a chain of long-buried secrets builds a wide rift between them.

“You know, I’m not big on this love role thing. People say I’m a gangster. But I mean, every man’s got some love in him, depending on how you choose to play him. Kunle Afolayan was able to bring that out, and it was phenomenal. At first, I was a bit sceptical. I was worried. But from my first encounter with Sharon, all the worries and fears just dissolved,” he said.

“I know that I’m talented and a good actor, but it takes more than being a good actor and having talents to bring that cohesiveness that we needed to build that bond. I was glad that we struck that bond from day one.”

Recall is also the first time Olarotimi is working with Afolayan, even though they’ve hung around in the same circles for years. “It’s something that I’d like to do over and over again,” he said of working with Afolayan. “It becomes very easy to execute particularly because the person you’re working with knows the master plan. He has given you and all you have to do is just follow it.”

From the very first scene in the film to the last Goke is crying either from love, pain or heartbreak. How was the OG Nollywood hardman able to bring the character to this point?

“First and foremost that wasn’t me anymore. That was Goke. I dropped myself and dropped everything that I know how to do, and I’ll do normally, and I just went into the role,” he said. “For the number of days we shot for I didn’t even see myself. I started doing things like how I had envisioned him and how the director had told us he was. I just had to let go of Olarotimi and the hard guy.”

There is a scene in the film where Olarotimi’s Goke can’t stop crying and drops to his knees in front of his father-in-law played by Keppy Ekpenyong. For the character, he also had to wear prosthetic teeth to make the love story with Sharon more awkward. These are experiences that Olarotimi is not familiar with as an actor. “I’ve never played a character like this in a film before, and being thrust into the midst of that is a lot. He’s unlike what I used to play. I mean, every role is challenging, but this was more challenging,” he said.

At the premiere, the cast and crew seem at ease with each other. Sharon, who was away, called on Facetime. Bimbo Akintola who plays Goke’s sister reserved seats for other cast and crew members. This is not common in Nollywood. How did this happen?

“The director knew what he wanted to do, and the communication was fluid. It’s the collaboration of everyone on set. Every other actor on set came with their own good, beautiful act. The merging was just beautiful and seamless to work on,” said.

The film’s world premiere date has not been set yet, but Afolayan said he’s considering sometime in February as the cinema release date. What does Olarotimi hope people take away from the film? “That there is more to love and sacrifice.”

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ALSO READ: Olarotimi Fakunle is in His Nollywood Lover Boy Era

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