At the start of No U-Turn, the documentary’s director Ike Nnaebue speaks about embarking on his own coming of age. The phrasing is interesting. Clearly he has already passed the conventional coming of age stage, and is attempting a retracing. The path he follows is one common to the many Africans fashioning a route to Europe by road and water. In his youth, encouraged by stories about far-flung opportunities, he, too had embarked on the incredibly arduous trek.
The audience gets a visual map of what is to follow. From Nigeria to Benin to Burkina Faso to Mali to Mauritania and then to Morocco. Spain is within sight. It’s a story of the African migrant hustling via land and sea to paradise. The stories are plentiful already but, somehow, Europe has a bottomless appetite for stories of this sort. A chunk of the support that has led to this film comes from European funding bodies. It is unclear just what exactly excites Europe about these stories. Is it merely atavistic? Or is there something heavily artistic about the theme? Perhaps it is a way of reminding their citizens about the sheer fortune they enjoy just by being born in Europe? After all, at least one billionaire has said, “I was lucky I was born in the USA.” That’s a different place but the sentiment must be the same, compared to what obtains in Africa.
Nnaebue’s subjects, most of whom he finds on the road, have recognised the truth in Warren Buffet’s statement. They don’t have the financial resources to legally change their geographies and therefore their destinies, but other people have done it successfully. They want to take the chance. Before leaving Lagos, one of Nnaebue’s subjects tells him about getting to Libreville in his youth but then turning back when when he saw something unexpected and gruesome. A human hand bearing a still functional watch was discovered in the belly of a fish being gutted.
That early interview sets up the best thing about the documentary: the people, many of them Nigerians, come onscreen and transform the autobiographical story that Nnaebue is telling in voiceover. The writing is often overly poetic and the delivery stilted. The sociological and postcolonial context of the project may be admirable, but if the subjects that show up on cinematographer Jide Akinleminu’s camera were not as engaging as they are, none but academics would sit through the whole thing. The stories these subjects tell are quite sad in their own way but there is a spark of hope in nearly each subject’s visage. Take the lady the director finds in Bamako, Mali’s capital city. She tells him she no longer wants to stay in Mali, her home for four years. Europe is in her dreams but she has no money to make the trip. Her family is poor and she wants to help them; one way she can do that is by heading to Europe. Or she could find a good husband who would save her family from poverty. She is quite an energetic talker and so camera-friendly. In a different world, she could have been an actress or a broadcaster. In this one, she is a businesswoman making meagre ends meet. She can’t go to Europe; she can’t go back to Nigeria. Her family will not ask her questions but “it is a shameful thing to me.”
These stories will keep on getting told—and Europeans of all classes will be drawn to them for their own reasons. Nnaebue, who got as far as Mali before getting scared of what lay ahead of him, is the ideal teller of this tale, considering he never made it to Europe but found a way to make it in Africa. For European authorities trying to ensure fewer and fewer immigrants, whatever their roaming and conquering history, the director’s life is exemplary. If only more Africans could figure out their lives the way he did.
But he is not the main draw in No U-Turn. It is people like the Bamako lady who make these stories worth the effort of telling and viewing. Long after more people acknowledge that these kinds of documentaries have devolved into cliché, that will still be the case.
Director, Screenplay: Ike Nnaebue
Producers: Christilla Huillard-Kann, Okechukwu Omeire, Don Edkins, Tiny Mungwe
Cinematography: Jide Akinleminu
Editing: Matthieu Augustin
Music: Ikwan Onkha
Production Companies: Passion 8 Communications LTD (Lagos, Nigeria), Steps (Kapstadt, South Africa), Elda Productions (Paris, France)
World Sales: Day Zero Films (Berlin, Germany), Steps (Kapstadt, South Africa)
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Panorama Dokumente)
In Igbo, French, and Nigerian Pidgin
92 minutes