Emmanuel Iduma’s travelogue A Stranger’s Pose, recently longlisted for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize, has been made into a short film. Adapted by The Villah Collective, an Afrocultural filmmaking group, and produced by Seun Aladese, Gugu Gaea, Noel Michaels, Marcus Williams, and Iduma, the film, titled Here Comes a Stranger, features the actors Jean-Pierre Cherestal and Shaila Tyler.
Here is a synopsis of Here Comes a Stranger:
Extending the idea of travel, transience and estrangement from the pages of A Stranger’s Pose, we play with the idea among others of how experience of a different environment determines one’s stance and consequently, their way of being.
Here Comes A Stranger is a short film and visual poem on distance and desire, place and the placeless, and the world formed during the course of a journey. Shot in New York and New Jersey, it evokes the dreamscape of lovers, travelers, and all the strangers who are in a place, yet away from it.
A unique blend of travelogue, memoir, and photography, Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, published last year by Cassava Republic, takes the reader through his “recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys across African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca.”
The book, which came with a book trailer, has been praised by Teju Cole (“Dream of a perfect book, a ballad with all the lyrics remembered”) and Chris Abani (“Iduma arrests with the smallest of gestures, near haiku; like a small ray of hope, a tingle of adventure, an urgent desire, tracing through time and imagination”).
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