Sure, she jokes that she'd love to sleep after its release, but it's abundantly clear that she's beaming with happiness and gratitude at just being able to make a film like this one.
Isio is seeking asylum in the UK because there is a very real threat of danger if she were to return to Nigeria, something that Gharoro-Akpojotor had similar experiences of. While at the crux of Dreamers is very much a love story, it still must be hard to bare your soul on the big screen like this, I remark.
"I went through so much therapy in the process, during the filming. Not everything in the film happened to me but some things could've. The scene where Isio's with the case worker talking, it was much longer before, but that scene is verbatim what happened in my session.
The director adds: "The journey of Isio freeing her mind or realising her own voice, I think that was my journey of having to learn that immigration doesn't have to define you."
"I'm excited but also scared because it's a film that I hope a lot of people see," she says. "But also, it's a film that I want to challenge people, but the scary part is that you want people to engage in their love story and the immigration of it. I think it's the second Black lesbian film in cinemas in the UK.
When Gharoro-Akpojotor learnt that Dreamers fell into such a small statistic, how did that make the debut director feel? "It's wild. There are some stats that you never think about until somebody tells you. We made the film and knew 'They're queer, Black, it's about immigration' but that was it.
"We come from a period where people talk about diversity in film and TV, we talk about making a difference and then you suddenly realise it's a surface level thing. In my mind, you look at Black cinema for instance and you see the lack of."
"Then you look at queer cinema separately, there's not a lot of queer cinema in the UK and that's just before getting to being a Black woman. The things that frustrate me the most is when people are like 'Oh, maybe you haven't got audiences for your film' but I think the issue is that maybe you don't know how to market to these audiences. So therefore, you don't even want to put money behind marketing for these audiences to go and watch the film."
Around the age of 19, Gharoro-Akpojotor was on a mission to find just that as a film fan. She wanted to find films that could speak to her sexuality, race and also being from Nigeria. She wasn't looking for these films purely for her own amusement, it was also in a bid to help her come out to her mother at the time. "I was trying to gather research and see how [these characters] did it," she laughs but admits that every film she managed to find was American with nothing from the UK.
"It's nice to be part of that representation and growing the catalogue but it's also terrible that ... there's nothing. It's awful," she says, reflecting on Dreamers space in the somewhat non-existent queer Black cinema strand coming out of the UK.
The moderator had said that Gharoro-Akpojotor didn't have to answer but she wanted to, saying that it was a good conversation to have. "I'm not pushing an agenda, I'm just showing people that it exists," the director says as she reflects on how she answered at the time. "What you choose to do with that information is really up to you. This film cannot make you gay. But why are you so concerned with what everyone is doing in their bedrooms?"
"What I've realised taking the film around is that a lot of people don't know anything about immigration," Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me. She describes a woman in one of the screenings who acknowledged her own privilege before asking the director how exactly someone becomes an illegal immigrant.
"She had no idea how you could. Immigration is something where people are like, 'Oh immigrants' but there's no explanation, you don't understand the complexities of the immigration system," Gharoro-Akpojotor says. But she welcomes those questions because that's the point of the film, she explains. "Maybe people will begin to question the rhetorics around immigration or even just question their own belief as to what immigration is and who immigrants are."
View oEmbed on the source website"I think, for me, I find that there's an unconscious bias. I don't think a lot of people realise that they're doing it. One thing we do at Joi Productions is we say we're Black, queer, female-led and everything in between. But when you come to us, you don't have to sell your Blackness or your queerness. We encourage the fact that we don't need to explain to audiences that this is a queer character or this is a Black character.
Gharoro-Akpojotor continues: "I think sometimes with the people in power... when it comes to you being a person of colour or a person from an underrepresented group, if the person you're speaking to doesn't understand that, they ask you to dig deeper into whatever experience you have in order for them to understand.
"Whereas if you're in a room and everyone there has different lived experiences, they wouldn't be asking you to explain 'What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be working class?'. They would accept that it just is what it is. It's more about the story, less about the identity of the person. I think a lot of times in cinema, people spend more time wanting you to explain why you do A, B, C, D as a Black person. A lot of writers get frustrated."
"Why does he live there? Is there a shower? But there's never questions about his trauma or what led him there. He's just there. Then you insert a Black man and it's like 'Why is he there? What led him there?'. But I think that's a very unconscious thing where [if] you don't understand the other person, you spend more time trying to understand. Sometimes people conflate understanding character with understanding the character's backstory or experience for them to find a way for them to relate."
"That's because you're so used to hearing these painful, traumatic stories – go and read the paper, you'll find those stories, it's nothing new. I'm trying to tell a story of women and they're just in a place where they have to survive but that was hard for him to understand. 'How do you make me feel for them if you don't show their pain?' but again, with the man in the forest, you're not going 'Where's his trauma?'."
While the director has crafted a film that is very much centred on love, it does obviously also shine a light on the asylum process in the UK. How has it been fielding questions about immigration as if she's the sole beacon of information on it?
Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me that living in Dagenham 20 years ago, it was the rise of the British National Party and the English Defence League. Then, the rhetoric was that people are "coming over and taking our jobs", she says, "but 20 years later, we're still having the same conversations. Why are we? What is it about immigration that means you can't get a job?"
"The only difference is there's an economic differentiation because when you're an expat, you've got a bit of money, you can buy a house. When you're an immigrant coming over, the assumption is that you're very poor, you have nothing so therefore, you can't contribute. When in reality, people who come in seeking asylum used to be doctors, accountants, teachers, have all these skills that we don't bother to think about."
"The people I really want to watch the film are people who I want to be engaged with the immigration aspect of it too. I want the gays to go and watch it, I want women to go and watch it, people of any colour to go and watch it. Also, people who wouldn't normally watch a film about immigration and have their own questions."
She continues: "I have a thing where I'm like 'How can we expand Black cinema and it's not just in the hood or it's not just solely based on your culture?' It's just about people with lives and things that we all experience in life. That's one of the things I'm very passionate about, the expansion of Blackness in genre – horror, action, romance because I don't think we have enough of that. I want to see more Blackness across the board, in every shape and form."
"He's always making Animol a priority. It's been actually quite a wild time but I'm very excited, I can't wait for people to see it because it's so beautiful, it's very unexpected from him and I think it will really announce him as a voice that people should listen to visually, creatively. I don't think people are going to expect what the film is going to do."
"I have stories to tell and I feel like I should be able to tell them. In the UK, we're so used to putting people in boxes but what happens when we just take them away?"
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