Meet Ishaya Bako, Director of Road To Yesterday

Ishaya Bako is a filmmaker who is currently based in Abuja. As a child, he was inspired to direct and produce films after watching movies like Jurassic Park and The Silence of the Lambs. Before studying film-making at the London Film School, he obtained a Bachelors in management information systems.

Ishaya Bako, the director of Road to Yesterday.

Ishaya has been a filmmaker for five years now. He tells Naij.com during an exclusive interview at his studio in Durumi, Abuja, that his first major project was his graduation film, Braids on a Bald Head, for which he won recognition at some film festivals.
“It was what would let me know whether or not I would finish my course,” he said of the 25-minute short.
However, the film that brought him out, so to speak, to the Nigerian audience was another short, Fuelling Poverty, a documentary, he says, about the fuel subsidy scam. It was banned by the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board for being “highly provocative and likely to incite or encourage public disorder and undermine national security.”
In spite of this, it won Best Documentary at the 2013 African Movie Academy Award. Ishaya says the movie inspired itself because at the time it was made, subsidy was the big issue in the country.
“I did a couple of other short films with PPDC – Public and Private Development Centre (Homevida Awards),” he says of his other projects. “After that I did Henna with Afrinolly and now my first feature length film, Road to Yesterday.”

The latter is a collaboration with popular Nollywood actress Genevieve Nnaji. It is her first self-produced film based off a story she conceived. Apart from directing the film, Ishaya co-wrote it with his writing partner Emile B. Garuba.
On how he came to work with an established star like Genevieve, being what some would consider next to an unknown in Nollywood himself, Ishaya said: “We met through a collaborative medium. We were developing a project Uzo Iweala, who wrote Beast of No Nation, a novel. From our conversations, she had the idea for Road to Yesterday and she talked to me about it and said, ‘This is something I want to do, this is a film I want to make; can you write it?’ It was a challenge because I had really little time to fully understand her idea and the story she wanted to tell and then to bring out a screenplay from it. But then it was a collaboration through and through.”
He praised the actress, calling her “iconic” and noting her “wealth of experience.”

Senator Ben Murray-Bruce, Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed, Genevieve Nnaji and Ishaya Bako at a screening of Road to Yesterday in Abuja.

The movie, which stars British actor Oris Erhuero, Majid Michel, Ebele Okaro and comedian Chi Gurl, Ishaya says, is a road film and a modern day love story about a couple in distress.
“At the point in time we meet them we are not sure why but we know that marriage is difficult. So they go on a road trip to mend their relationship and in trying to mend their relationship, they discover what is wrong.”
It premiered on November 29 in cinemas around Nigeria.

Already, Ishaya has moved on to his next project. He is writing a comedy this time.
“It’s something I haven’t done in a while,” he said, which to those who know his work may sound like an understatement, seeing as he has done only “serious” films up till now.
But his lighter side may not come as a surprise, considering that one of the people he looks up to is the late Amaka Igwe, director and producer of such fare as Fuji House of Commotion and Pastor Kasali.

Amaka Igwe

“Rattlesnake is one of my all-time favourite Nigerian films,” he says citing one of the late director’s iconic works. “I think it was the first one I watched and was like, ‘Wow! This is how films should be in Nigeria.’”
Although, up till now, his major projects have been done away from the mainstream Nigerian film industry and have been produced independently or by a NGO or CSO, Ishaya still considers himself a Nollywood filmmaker.
“Yes, I am a Nollywood filmmaker,” he said. “Because I do make films in Nigeria. I live and work in Nigeria. There has been criticism of the film industry in Nigeria but with the criticism, I think there is a lot to appreciate and acknowledge because Nollywood as an industry exists very differently from every other film industry in the world. It adopted home video technology very fast, found an audience and this were people that were telling their own stories.”
He hopes that Nollywood will be an industry that “we can still work in.”
“We can pay rent with; marry, have our children with. That is it now. At least, let us be able to eat from making films, that’s all.”