TONI Kan, author of many books, will be squaring off against the veteran Nollywood actor Richard Mofe Damijo at the Lagos Book and Art Festival.
The two will be conversing around RMD: Portrait of a Warri Boy, the recently published biography of the actor, at the session entitled: In Cold Text: How I Made it in Nollywood, holding at 5pm on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, at the Kongi’s Harvest Art Gallery, Freedom Park on Lagos Island.
The actress Omoni Oboli and the producer Charles Novia will also be speaking at the feast, an annual festival of the arts with a high book content.
Oboli will be addressing the audience on the pivotal events in her career which provided the basis for her writing her memoir: The Stars are Ageless.
Charles Novia will be fielding questions on Nollywood till November: Memoirs of a Nollywood Insider, an in-depth, no-holds barred look at the very early beginnings of the phenomenon that is now simply called Nollywood, especially the production ecosystem in Surulere, the middle-class neighborhood that hosted it.
LABAF, which is in its 23th year, holds from November 15-21, 2021 at the Freedom Park with the theme, A FORK IN THE ROAD.
In Cold Text: How I Made it in Nollywood is a 2-hour session dedicated to conversations around memoirs and biographies that have been published by actors, directors and producers who have helped shape the Nigerian movie scene in the last 30 years.
“There have been several books by scholars, journalists, even mere bystanders, about the breakthrough of the video making culture since Chris Obi-Rapu’s Living in Bondage, in 1992”, says Fred Akanni, a Lagos based business journalist, but Nollywood till November, published in 2012, is one of the first memoirs by an insider. Oboli’s The Stars are Ageless has also considerably helped”.
“LABAF is an umbrella market of culture producers and culture consumers”, explains Jahman Anikulapo, Programme Chair of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), which is hosting the event. “We have been discussing the role of literary texts in the movies at this festival in the last five years. But now, a number of memoirs have been published and we think we should engage them”, he adds. “Nollywood itself will turn 30 in 2022, so this session, happening in late 2021, is a sort of preface to the anniversary”.
Toni Kan, 50, is the personable, hugely popular, author of Nights of The Creaking Bed (collection of short stories) and The Carnivorous City (Novel). He shares a shred of history with Mofe Damijo, 60. The former went to secondary school at St Patrick Asaba, close to 10 years after Moe Damijo passed through the same school.
“I have a few questions I am planning to throw at him”, Kan said in a telephone interview. “It should be fun”.
