Family is everything, but sometimes that love can be tested.
Idris Elba’s Oscar-qualified short, Dust to Dreams, centers on Millicent, the owner of a Lagos nightclub that buzzes with spirit night after night. Unfortunately, she has fallen ill and it becomes a question of who will inherit and operate the club once she passes. Her London-based daughters, Comfort and Patience, would like to sell the space, but their half-sister Bisi is more committed to its survival. In speakng with producer Mo Adubu, I could sense her enthusiasm and passion for every aspect of this film.
Adubu developed the story, but Elba wrote the screenplay. She expresses a need to see more fictional stories being told about the relationships with the people of Africa. There are far too many films and television shows that center their narrative on dire circumstances or trauma. The collaboration was open and honest.
“It started off with me wanting to do a story that reflects some of the key narratives that are often missed when we’re telling African stories,” Abudu says. “If you look around the world at stories that are often portrayed about us, it’s very traumatic. It’s either war or disease or famine–there’s more to us than this. Every society has those moments, but we also have the family dynamics, we have the legacy, we have the conflict. We have music in our lives. In our story, a woman is dying and she’s trying to find a way and manner in which her only daughter can meet her long lost father. These stories aren’t just stories that come from the West. Some people don’t want to see that–they want to see, what I call, poverty porn. When I did the initial draft, Idris read it and asked if I minded if he took a crack at it. He is such a humble person and he never wants to offend anyone, but I didn’t take any offense to it. He and I are both so committed to telling African stories in a way that people haven’t seen before.”
The opening scene is similiar to a Shakespearean power play when all of the women are in one room and they try to decide the fate of the nightclub. Characters assume they know another’s intentions, and one of the daughters asks her sister, ‘Which interests are you after?’
“There’s a bit of a race issue going on there, because the two sisters are mixed and Millie is not full Nigerian,” she says. “I think the message there was that Papa K, who owned the nightclub at some point, wandered off and had another relationship with their mother, who isn’t the same mother as Millie’s. You can’t just claim that you are the only one, the sisters argue. People fighting over the same piece of real estate or property doesn’t just happen in Europe or America–it happens in Africa too.”
The dynamic between this quartet of women is rattled at the return of Johnson, a musician with paternal ties to the family. For those of us who remember Seal’s rise to prominence in the United States will not be surprised at the musician’s magnetism and gentle nature in the role.
“I wanted Idris to play the singing solder initially, and he did agree to it until he turned around and said, ‘I think I’ve got someone that’s going to be better at this than I am,'” she says. “When he told me Seal, I couldn’t believe it. How do we get access to Seal–I certainly don’t have a connection. He told me to leave it to him. Seal has never done anything like this before–he’s a four time Grammy winner. He brought so much authenticity to the role that we were all just blown away. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing when he was on set. I have to thank Idris over and over, because, being an actor, he spent so much time with the actors on set. He didn’t just give notes, he gave his guidance. I really understood how actors can be great directors while watching him work.”
As Elba’s film draws to a close, we enter the world of the club, and we see how connected the audience is to the space. As Papa K and Bisi take the stage, we get the sense that this relationship will move forward. That’s the most important part. Adubu reveals what it was like to be in the room while Elba shot that sequence.
“We shot the final scene in a nightclub in Lagos called Rococo, and we even had timing restrictions since that had to open that evening,” she says. “We had to know what we were doing when we got there. We mounted the stage, but we went to a studio prior to since we are releasing the song before the end of the year as a single. It was written by Seal, Idris, Constance [Olatunde] and a Nigerian group called the Cavemen. It’s a song about motherhood and the love that you have for your mom. Some of it is in our local language, and we loved the song so it was almost like watching a live performance when they recorded it in the studio. The club is a place where talent is discovered, so you either win with the audience or you don’t–the audience is the judge. This night was no different. It was so magical when Seal came out on stage. People were tearful in the crowd by the end, especially seeing this big star performing with someone playing his daughter.”
