After five years of script development, writing, labs and workshops across Africa and Europe, writer/director C.J. Obasi’s third feature film Mami Wata has wrapped. The feature shot in four weeks in Benin republic, with a cast and crew spanning seven countries began it’s lab journey in 2018 at Ouaga Film Lab, where it won the Le Groupe Ouest’s Less is More (LIM) and European AudioVisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE) Producers Workshop prizes, allowing writer/director C.J. and producer Oge Obasi to participate in year long workshops in Poland, Romania, France, Luxembourg, Serbia and Germany. The project has also been presented at the Durban FilmMart and the Sorfond Pitching Forum, Oslo, and without any official co-production funds, Fiery Film in partnership with iFind Pictures (France), Guguru Media (Nigeria), and New Direction Films (Benin) began principal photography in January 1, after spending the entire December in quarantine and pre-production with the cast and crew. In a post, C.J. says the shoot nearly killed him, and he is seriously considering writing a book about his experience making the movie, citing several inexplicable and even supernatural experiences while making the supernatural themed movie in Vodun festival season in Benin.
We have been waiting for Mami Wata for long, and our joy knows no bounds that after all the many challenges, the film is finally a reality!
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