This project has been tugging at my heart for a few years now. My first ‘real’ encounter of life in Nigeria and the life of area boys was in December 2003, the first time I had gone back ‘home’ since I came to the UK in 1989. This experience was such a spiritual awakening that I was compelled to keep a journal of my feelings for my foreign fatherland. (Part of the transcript can be read here…)

On my departure, I left with a vision, a sense of God’s calling on my life to do what I could for my country. I had a burning passion for Africa but Nigeria would do for starters. God knows it’s a big enough project!

I met a host of relatives who had embarked on, or were seriously considering leaving Nigeria’s shores for the promise of a better life in Europe and the Middle-East. Hardly any of them made it successfully, but this didn’t detract others from doing the same. So, here I was thinking, ‘these guys think the battle is won when they arrive at their destination, but really that’s when the war begins!’ This thought process was the birth of SEEKER.

For a while now I’d had a far-fetched idea to do a loose trilogy of short films chronicling the 3 stages (beginning, middle, end) in the journey of asylum seekers from West Africa into the ‘promised’ land of Europe. Loose in the sense that the stories and characters would not be linked in any way. The only link being that each story focused on the life of immigrants.

AREA BOYS is the beginning of that journey…