Fred Amata. by BOB EJIKE

MY FATHER WAS AFRICA’S FIRST FILMMAKER: FRED AMATA. 

By  BOB EJIKE

Not even Professor Ola Rotimi’s warnings prepared me for the financial trauma and deprivation that I was going to face as a pioneer Nigerian professional actor after my National Youth Service in the 80s. So dehumanizing was it that when I eventually managed to leave the shores of Nigeria on economic exile and found gainful employment as a teacher and musician in Italy, I was certain that I had had it with Nigerian art, which could neither pay your rent nor put food on the table. 13 years later when I returned, my younger brother Obinna, who also managed my music in Nigeria, relayed Nigerian films everyday just to re-ignite my interest in them, but I found them too noisy, and their gory voodoo scenes rather crude.  It was a chance meeting with Fred Amata on a DBN Television program, on which both of us were guests that finally changed my impression. The handsome, optimistic, ever-cheerful Benzy, jeans and T-shirt clad keep-fit freak, Fred went to great pains to graphically explain to me the benefits of returning to the industry, and our commitment as young African artistes to contribute in the development of a respectable indigenous black artistic tradition. Eventually I was taken in by the eloquence of his argument and the charm of his youthful charisma. Within a short period of time I was on set acting with him, and before long I realized that there was nothing one could do in the film industry without involving at least one member of the Amata family, and in the years that followed, my artistic activities were constantly tied to them. Eventually I found myself facing the camera, with Fred calling the shots.

I honored Fred’s invitation to his cosy office that he shares with his wife Agatha in Surulere. On arrival Agatha welcomed me. I apologized for my inability to be a guest of Inside Out, pleading a tight artistic program. My attention shifted focus to her husband whose friendliness had besieged me from that day we were both guests of DBN Television. I was struck by the unassuming humility he displayed in spite of the great heights he has attained in the Nigerian film industry, first as an actor and artistic creative director and now as a director. He had left his creative footprints on such films as Mortal Inheritance, Dust to Dust, Jetta Amata’s Fire and Glory, etc, scripted Onome, Last Believer, and Dust to Dust, which he also directed. Other films produced under his direction include The Kingmaker, The Prostitute, The Addict, Anini, Bai Bureh Goes To War (produced by Olu Jacobs, in collaboration with Sierra Leonean filmmakers), Broken Chord, and Last Believer among several others. He was also involved in Daybreak, Opa Williams film Sergeant Okoro, Silent Night, Heart Beat, Nightmare, Black Mamba, Dangerous Desire and a host of others.

‘As a creative director, usually the scope of what I do involves bringing all the experience I have as writer, actor, director, script editor to play, usually it’s quite challenging because a lot of time the director has come with scripts or situations in scripts that I would say for lack of better expression below par and we have to re-script it, sometimes on location’. Fred Amata revealed.

Fred Amata has a hectic schedule, which takes him to Sierra Leone, South Africa, Europe and America. He started his artistic profession as an actor while he was a student of the Theater Arts Department of University of Jos, Nigeria. His elder brother Zak Amata was his lecturer (three other Amatas, Mena, Ruke and Jeta studied under Zak). After his graduation he joined the National Youth Service Corp at NTA (Nigerian Television Authority), Lagos, and started acting on the Zeb Ejiro soap opera Ripples and Checkmate. Other soap operas in which he starred include Dreams and Legacy. He has had an ideal working relationship with Chico Ejiro and Opa Williams, which resulted in optimum utilization of his creative genius.  Fred likes to joke that if the Amata’s had not established a movie dynasty, they would have probably become sportsmen, as both their father and Zak were very good footballers and athletes.

In 1957 the older Amata, a course mate of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, wrote and recorded Freedom, which according to Fred became the first African film, in conjunction with Moral Rearmament, a charitable organization that he worked for. Freedom was a stage play adapted for cinema with a cast of Nigerians, Ghanaian and East Africans, and shot on Eastman Color (Fred let me watch scenes from the classic celluloid movie). The stage production was presented around the world.

‘You understand that when other kids were watching John Wayne, I was watching Amata’. He told me with boyish pride, ‘my father is a theater artiste, a playwright and a film director; so right from our early days we were all groomed to act. Essentially I grew up desiring to be an actor, like my father, to compound that, my elder brother Zak Amata was in the university studying Theater arts. He was already performing on stage and TV. All my role models were in the family and when I went to study theater arts in University of Ibadan, Zak was my lecturer’.

 So, fired by the spirit of paternal loyalty, the Amatas decided from the onset to take their family tradition forward. Zak Amata was at another point his father’s classmate in Ibadan. This situation came about because the older Amata had given up his undergraduate study to work for Moral Rearmament, which took him around the world. Twenty years later, he returned to finish his study and found himself in the same class with his son. It is on record that both Amatas graduated the same year from the University of Ibadan. Zak competes with his son Jetta for production prowess. Fred Amata explains the Amata dynasty. “We actually have three generations of artistes right now, my father is the leader of the generation, Zak is the leader of the second generation, and then Jetta, Zak’s son is the pivot of the third generation”. Jetta Amata has directed (among others) an intellectually critical version of Ola Rotimi’s The God Are Not to Blame. The situation is reversed for Zak, just like in a typical Amata film scenario; he competes with his son Jetta in the film industry for production prowess and hardly beats him!

Fred Amata believes that there is a hereditary trait in the artistic excellence of himself, Ruke, Mena, Eloho, Zak, Jeta, Viefe (Jetta and Viefe are Zak’s sons, and Viefe, is a 17 year-old editor) and all the members of the Amata family. This trait, in Mr Amata’s view is so potent that it also transferred to their spouses, like his wife Agatha, who beside being the anchorperson of a popular Nigerian TV show was the producer of The Addict, (a movie directed by her husband), with her younger brother Tony Nwokolo outstandingly playing the lead role. Fred’s efforts are complimented by Agatha’s creative inputs. Her program Inside Out is one of the few Nigerian television program with a live audience, in an ambient where most Television stations are full of cheap discussion shows in which a presenter introduces one or two talkative who prattle on about one issue or the other. Agatha takes the trouble to organize a real participating audience, and in every sense of the word she has become the authentic television heir of the late May Ellen Ezekiel, Nigeria’s Oprah Winfrey.

Thus the succour of creativity spilled over to their in-laws, to the extent that even Agatha’s younger sister has a TV talk show on Nigerian television. The muse-pecked Amata bloodline also transferred artistry to Fred and Agatha’s two children Oreva and Stephanie. Oreva has already commenced an acting career, appearing in Fred’s film The Fire and The Glory; even Stephanie is displaying the Amata flay for artistic performance, composing songs, singing, posing, modelling and doing TV commercials. Both Amatalets featured in Tade Ogidan’s Dangerous Twins.

Beside their inherent artistic creativity, the strength of the Amatas lies in their unity, informed by love and appreciation for one another. Behind the scene they collaborate on the drawing board and thoroughly criticize and make inputs in eachother’s projects before they are released to the public.

By his own admission, Fred Amata’s acting career has experienced a nosedive since he concentrated his energy on directing. In the highly stereotyped Nigerian film industry, producers have become reluctant to cast him in their films, categorizing him strictly as a director, in the same way Lillian Bach was initially avoided as a model and I was tagged a musician and consequently kept out of lead roles for many years. Mr Amata’s decision to switch over to directing was based on his experience as an actor. He realized that since most Nigerian film directors were theater-trained television veterans, they were lacking in the proper technical competence for directing moving pictures. He first volunteered his skill as an assistant director in many home-video productions, but that did not give him the control and authority required for effective change, so he opted to become a director in order to have the ‘godlike’ power required to impose a transformation. He also admits that his choice of directing was influenced by the naira sign, as directors are fewer, often better paid than actors and hardly ever owed their fees, especially considering the fact that Fred Amata has evolved into one of the most sought-after directors in the Nigerian film renaissance, thus replacing the glamour of fame with the power of authority and cash. In a nutshell Fred’s family is growing and so are their needs, priority had to change for continuity and normalcy to prevail. Fred Amata more than anybody else knows that the earnings of the Nigerian actor may be high, but his job is always dangling on the precarious precipice of multiple concurrences. A good director has job security, and Agatha and her children cannot eat fame.

The actor/director is a staunch advocate of a collaboration between Hollywood and Nigeria, which he hopes would lead to the exportation of Nigeria films and the entrance of Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) into the mainstream world movie market, as opposed to the voiced intention of some celebrated Nigerian actors and actresses to emigrate to Hollywood. Amata sees the emigration option not only as a brain drain, but also as a degeneration of Nigerian stars into mendicants for Hollywood ‘waka pass’ (extra roles, crowd scene appearances etc). Mr. Amata’s theory of cooperation is based on his strong belief that Nollywood which has recorded the highest movie growth rate in human history, has finally come of age and is sufficiently equipped, both artistically and intellectually to collaborate with Hollywood. In his opinion the only edge Hollywood has over Nollywood is finance and technology. He dismisses critical assertions that the Nigerian tendency towards hasty productions fills the market with mediocre films, believing instead that the speed and intensity of work in Nigerian film keep the practitioners continually on their toes, in a permanent movie workshop where the cast and crew change weekly, and working perpetually under pressure improves skill, imaginativeness and competence at an astounding pace. Judging by the quality of what Nigerian actors produce in one week, under adverse working conditions, if given normal conditions, our hard baked actors will even outdo their pampered Hollywood counterparts. Nigeria is technologically equipped for the production of any kind of movie, but the lack of good sponsors increase the prevalence of low budget movies, which constrains individual producers to utilizing the technology affordable by their lean purses, thus giving the general impression that Nigeria lacks modern film technology.

Fred Amata visualizes Nigeria leading the world film market. To buttress his point he remembers that TV producers and entertainment writers dismissed Nigerian films as substandard and unviable at the onset, but now it has fully taken root as Nigeria’s highest entertainment output, liberating the nation from Hollywood’s stranglehold, a feat that even Europe has not been able to attain. The full exploitation of our movie potentials can only be achieved with the full participation of the government and the corporate world. So optimistic is Fred Amata that he predicts these changes within the next three years, under the right atmosphere.

On the incessant accusation of the preponderance of cult of personality, the recycling of ‘old faces’ in Nigerian films, the blunt Mr. Amata professes that these so called ‘old faces’ are actors who have been waiting patiently for their turn, standing in the seemingly unmoving cue of  upward mobility in the film industry, and should therefore be allowed to benefit from the fruit of their labour and perseverance. New artistes should learn the virtue of patience and be willing to pay their dues.

Mr Amata opposes the syndrome of making two part films for commercial reasons, putting the unproductive trend squarely on the doorsteps of marketers who want to buy two films for the price of one, while striving for proper regulating guidelines to checkmate the short-changing of Nigerian filmmakers by media outfits like DSTV AfricaMagic, and also check piracy, both locally and internationally, and ensure that practitioners get royalties for the rising international sale of Nigerian films.

 I suggest that it must be a happy thing to marry your campus sweetheart. The couple smiles shyly.  After their days as students in University of Jos, they met again at a popular discotheque in Lagos and the fire of love consumed them just like in the movies, they decided that this time, they were never going to say goodbye, that love was forever and ever, so they got married and raised a family.

“I realized that she was a very special person from the first day I met her”, says Fred. But Agatha interrupted in feigned anger. “How come you don’t tell me these beautiful things to my face?” suggesting that love needs constant expression. I am certain that he shows his affection in more ways than words can say.

“Agatha you’re a very special person”, Fred said with an affectionate smile.

“Thank you, you’re special too”. She replied.

 Boisterous laughter!

Fred Amata was recently elected President of the Actors Guild of Nigeria. Join me in congratulating him!!

BOB EJIKE