The Cinema of Tunde Kelani

“This collection of essays on the works of one of Africa’s most influential moviemakers is a major addition to the debates and studies on Nigerian and African cinema. Tunde Kelani, through his Yorubacentric masterpieces, has used his films to contribute to burning issues in Nigeria, Africa and by extension, the world as a whole. Reading the foreword, introduction and, eventually, the essays gives the reader a sense of being at a conference where these works are being dissected, for the first time, to reveal their philosophical, aesthetic, political and humanistic underpinnings. Although critical opinions on Tunde Kelani are scattered in theses, dissertations and scholarly essays, this is, perhaps, the first book that discusses him as a true African auteur whose works can compete, favourably, with those of auteurs in other climes. There is no doubt that anyone interested in film, teachers, students, practitioners and the general public will find this book refreshingly illuminating.”

“This compelling multi-disciplinary collection of essays offering a pluri-focal journey into the world and work of one of Nigeria's leading veteran filmmakers is unquestionably an important contribution to film studies, and to African film studies in particular. Its timely celebration of this pioneering and pivotal figure, who bridges the generations and styles from the celluloid era of the 1970s to the ubiquitous Nollywood of present, is a salutary reminder of the diversity of Nigerian cinema. Most propitious too is the editors’ choice to privilege the critical voices of an array of scholars culturally embedded in the very Yorùbá aesthetics, language and world view that characterize Kelani’s unique and rich cinema, destabilizing asymmetries of knowledge production in what is truly a decolonial gesture and proposing a wealth of original, complexifying frames of analysis and layered readings, insightfully complemented by Kelani’s own voice.”