ONE of the tragedies of an insurgent creative movement like Nollywood is that a few important heroes of its emergence are martyred uncelebrated in their time. Ask any random young filmmaker in Nollywood who is Wale Fanu or even Cinekraft Studios and you are most likely to draw a blank.
Whilst there is no deliberate conspiracy to deny due credit to these heroes, we seem to only wake up to count our loss after they depart. It is what has deepened the grief of many like myself when we learnt of the passing of dear Wale Fanu Co-Founder/CEO of Cinekraft Films at the weekend.
He was a veteran and venerable TV/film Producer whose career works spanned broadcasting and film. He was also the energizer of many heritage projects in independent production in the late 80s and 90s and personal mentor to emerging storytellers across spectrum.
Wale Fanu was trained and worked as a cineast in the days of celluloid. And sometime in the 80s he bravely stepped out of the security of civil service to co-found with Tunde Kelani and others what then was an insurgent production company from the garage of his family house at 7 Jakande Close Surulere. That address would become iconic in the history of film/TV production in Africa.
With TK and a film crew steeped in technical experience and some smart investments in lighting and grip equipment, Cinekraft became where either the idea or the equipment support or the post-production of almost every important film, documentary, music video or TV commercial was done in the late 80s and 90s.
The list of names and projects are endless. There is hardly any motion picture professional who will not remember with great nostalgia what a melting pot Cinekraft was. It’s crew backed over seventy percent of the international projects filming across the country.
The legend of how Nollywood got its early funding from Idumota market and Iweka road Aba is true. It is also true that it was at places like Cinekraft that the funding was stretched impossibly to cover the needed equipment, crew and post-production to make those early Nollywood films happen. And it often was stretched because Wale Fanu was beyond filmmaking a unique human.
He was an enabler by instinct. Nothing was too much of a challenge and his joy came from making the impossible happen.
I first met him in 1987 when I was First AD to the great Jimi Odumosu on the film project ‘Uduak the will of God.’ I went to Cinekraft with Jimi to do an equipment audit for our travel with their crew. That meeting has been fortuitous to my journey as over the course of my three decades in this industry, the people I met from Cinekraft have been my creative collaborators, my long-standing friends and support systems.
I joined the advertising agency LINTAS not long after project Uduak and I would happily find that Wale Fanu and Cinekraft was also already a preferred production supplier there. In my time in advertising, at Lintas and later at STB-McCann we worked together on literally hundreds of projects big and small. We became family. Inevitably.
Memorably, the after-hours soirées that marked that my Lintas era evolved into a small mentoring circle of young ambitious former Lintas executives like Uche Almona, Adetola Akintemi, Felix Ofulue, Ottah Kalu and myself who used to regularly sit around Isiewu portions in the inner streets of Aguddah Surulere to glean from Wale Fanu’s life lessons and stories.
In his elements he was rambunctious, full of practical jokes, always challenging us to be ‘urgent’ about life because no one knows when or how it ends. I always found this repeated warnings about the impermanence of life to young men that we were back then, a bit odd.
In time we would all understand it and it gave us all clarity and focus in our life journey. We would discover that beyond filmmaking, Wale Fanu was a towering expression of human resilience and courage. Born 21 April 1950, doctors said he would not live to see his 20th birthday after a sickle-Cell crisis left him in coma for days.
He even developed the painful complication known as avascular necrosis in his early 20s and yet he held on for over 50years without surgery! With his condition, he would drive long distances himself to bring cameras, filming lights or generators to locations just so a production will not fail. He stayed up overnight on many nights in the wood shed of Cinekraft ensuring that work in the post-production suites met deadlines.
He was always there to attend to everyone needing something at Cinekraft because he often would sit on a bench outside the building so you were most likely to encounter him first on arrival. So many years of shared ideas, stories and support to everyone and sundry projects in this industry is what makes the passing of Uncle Wale Fanu a real loss to our industry.
History will be kind to his memory and hopefully when we all gather to bid this giant our final goodbyes, we will also remember to say our heartfelt thank you for that avuncular spirit of possibilities that defined him and inspired us all.
May his soul rest in peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment