Dignity, Grace, and Regality: A Conversation with Sundance Film Festival 2023 ‘Bravo, Burkina!’ Filmmaker Walé Oyéjidé
Walé Oyéjidé spoke with Script about his filmmaking journey, how his creative background was woven into the story of the film, the importance of messaging and intent in his filmmaking, and so much more. Plus, Walé shares invaluable advice for new screenwriters on how to find their voice – it’s worth taking note.
Two voices provocatively ask, “How far must we go? How many masks must we wear? Before we see ourselves for who we are?” Walé Oyéjidé’s imaginative debut feature is the story of a Burkinabè boy who migrates to Italy but later discovers a way to go back in time to regain what he lost. The poetic story bends time to explore the meaning of existing in two states, coming and going, running away and running toward. It is a multidimensional exploration of love and migration.
Walé Oyéjidé is a writer-director and designer who dispels bias with beauty. His fashion designs appeared prominently in Marvel’s Black Panther and have exhibited in museums around the globe. Oyéjidé is a Sundance Feature Film Program fellow, National Geographic explorer, TED fellow, Open Society Foundations fellow, and Google Image Equity fellow. His documentary After Migration: Calabria is streaming on Criterion Channel.
Walé's feature debut Bravo, Burkina! is not to be overlooked nor underhyped. It's exquisite filmmaking from aesthetics to the haunting silence - Walé's pulse on storytelling is a mix of the Italian filmmaking auteurs that came before him with his unique modern vision and vibrant lens. The story, the film, and the visuals will be left imprinted in your memory, with at least a week of imagery and characters visiting you in your dreams - if you're so lucky.
I recently had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Walé about his filmmaking journey, how his creative background was woven into the story of the film, the importance of messaging and intent in his filmmaking, and so much more. Plus, Walé shares invaluable advice for new screenwriters on how to find their voice - it's worth taking note.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Sadie Dean: Congrats with premiering your film at Sundance! It was really cool to see how your creative background folded into the film.
Walé Oyéjidé: Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I'm sure we can chat, certainly, about how the soup was made, but I think it is an interesting thing, it's the kind of rare occurrence of when one's past experiences get to be kind of displayed in one setting. Which is really nice, because I think for any of us who are artists, a lot of us have these meandering paths. And particularly for our parents it's like, ‘What are you doing?!’ [laughs] And it's nice when you get to do something that, ‘Hey I picked this us up from here and this is from here,’ and you get to exhibit a lot of your history in one space, which is helpful for me.
Sadie: Right, and you’re also paying homage to your elders and your family, proving it’s not all terrible! [laughs]
Walé: Yes, agreed. The whole making of this is for me - it's super nice to hear, because first of all, the film still has not been widely seen, so any input is still interesting and good input to hear. And I think it's really important. The great thing about Sundance is the audience, by and large, are not persons who are from my background, and so when you have people in the audience who don't look like you and probably have had a very different personal history from you, who say, ‘I just watched my uncle's story’ or ‘my dad's story’ or ‘I'm that person’ and you're like, yes, because it is intended to be a universal allegory. It's really on the surface about a thing, but I think the hope is that anybody can watch this and say, ‘Oh, that was me’ or ‘this is the thing that happened to me.’
Sadie: Yeah, totally, there's a universal thread in the storytelling. I’m curious about the creative process for you behind this film, knowing that you were wearing so many creative hats, what came first? Was it the imagery or was it the story this boy and the family?
Walé: So interestingly, it was kind of one of the situations in which logistics somewhat dictate how it's made. This was made in partnership with a small subsidiary of the United Nations called Ethical Fashion Initiative. They support artisans around the globe who are particularly in developing nations. So, for example, the actual weavers in the film are all real ladies in their place of work, and that's them at work. And they in real life, provide avenues for these ladies to weave that cotton and it gets sent off to Europe to these fancy fashion houses like Vivienne Westwood or Louis Vuitton, so the idea is that you're giving these people who are making a livelihood in their nation from giving their traditional work, and then you're not transferring that work to a place where it wouldn't otherwise find an audience.
So, the question was, for me, now having a relationship with EFI was how can I write a story that sheds light on these wonderful people in a way that is universal and particularly attaches to my great interest in migration stories? For me, it was like, ‘Well, what if there was a kid who was from that community, and ended up being one of the many refugees and migrants who have worked within Europe?’ That was my touch point - a boy from there ends up here - now, how do we write a story around that premise? Why would he leave? What would make him leave? What would happen to him if he was far away? And what will be important?
I think the third act of the film is the ramifications of the chasm that is created in the absence of anyone. So, in this particular story, it's the obvious chasm of like you leave the community, the world continues to spin in the absence of all of this. What happens when you leave your town, you leave your school, you leave your loved ones, they continue on and sometimes to their detriment, but they continue on and when you come back, you have to reckon with life has gone on without you sometimes for better or sometimes for worse.
And so, I think that was kind of what I was trying to touch on the idea that each of us is the protagonist in our own story. I thought a lot about mothers in this story and then it gets all our mothers and all our loved ones. The idea that like our the kid has gone, but I am here enough to be strong. And so, the father passes away, and so what? She was carrying all of this, ‘I've been strong for decades without you and now you show up, that's great, but I've been here the whole time. It's like you left but we've been here, we're doing this on our own.
Those are the things I was looking at from different angles. It is certainly a migration story, but it's also, I think, a lot of it is just the personal story of any of us, we all left the thing - we left the person, we left something we loved, and we've wondered what would happen if we could go back. Should we have gone back? Did we make the right choice? And there's no answer.
Sadie: Yes, 100% And not to give away any spoilers, but I really loved the twist within the twist in the movie, with the magic behind the weaving and the thread of life. Really well done.
Walé: Yeah, it's like how many times can we up the ante? Introducing this film was interesting, because it's attempting to do so much and how you describe it is basically, ‘It's a time travel migration allegory love story,’ but I think that may be intriguing to many viewers, but if I said to you, ‘here's a refugee story,’ that’s probably not as interesting to many people. So, the question becomes, how do I turn eyes on an issue that I care about? What fantastical narrative and story elements can we add to this that are hopefully executed in a very tasteful in a beautiful way to make this interesting? Any of us who has kids, how do you feed them the vegetables where it's not distasteful? [laughs] So, it's trying to do that.
Sadie: [laughs] Right, it's an easy way to make the medicine go down. When you were sitting down to write the script, did you already have it in your head of how you saw it as a director and how you’d end up cutting the film?
Walé: There was a lot on the page already, which by the way, it was very short. Here's the interesting rub with the story, people ask, ‘why is this film so short?’ They should be asking, ‘Why isn't it so long?” Because it was intended to be a short film. My screenplay was like 30 pages, but then we came home from the edit, this was shot in 12 days, the insanity - I think sometimes you take on a thing you don't realize how crazy it's going to be - we had a crew of six people. We first flew to Italy; we filmed the Italian portion first and all hopped on a plane, had to sneak the batteries and equipment on a plane, [laughs] flew to Burkina Faso, filmed in six days, and then came home. And so, when I'm looking at the edit, it was sitting at about 70 minutes, and then the initial assembly we had to massage it down to like a more tasteful 60. So, it is a very tiny, tiny feature film and it’s much shorter than what we typically expect these days where you're sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour Marvel-Lord of the Rings epics.
This film to me feels like it's a lot more of a poem. It's a lot more evocative. There are not any lengthy monologues saying here's my motivation. It's really more about do you catch a feeling from the scenes, and do these images speak to you in a way that's hopefully evocative. And that way, I think it is hopefully effective. So, when you're not getting super deep character development, you're getting hopefully, more fleeting images of like, just these memories and these dreams that we can hopefully attach something to, and we hope it works in that way.
Sadie: Speaking of imagers, there are these beautifully constructed scenes, which you could pause any frame, print and hang on your wall, but you have your characters in these statuesque poses, and that imagery with the silence, it reveals so much information about the characters, the location, and the tone What was the motivation behind that specific imagery?
Walé: Yeah, it was pretty organic. My cinematographer Jake Saner, brilliant, brilliant cinematographer - this is our second project together, we did a short documentary called After Migration: Calabria, which was the preceding film to this that was made in Italy, kind of an intimate portrait of these two West African refugees integrating in Italy. I bring him up, because we came up with this visual language of posing the individuals as almost these classic Renaissance-era statues. In that film, it's these poised, beautifully gripped with African migrants, who are poised as the same figures that people in that part of the world have seen for centuries, and in some cases, even worship - like you see the Virgin Mary this way. So, it was this juxtaposition of a person you wouldn't imagine seeing in this place in these clothes posing this way and the world moves around them still.
And so, when we came to this film, it was the idea of there's so much about time moving and time shifting back and forth. We wanted to freeze individuals in these regal and dignified moments, but also just giving them time to just be still and so like when you bring that up, I think immediately of the parents mourning, the child and his absence. And that's an interesting thing where there's so much that goes into it like when we were filming that scene, the two individuals, the elderly man and woman, they were saying that just culturally, ‘kneeling in the gravel by the water we wouldn't do this culturally,’ but they understood that we are trying to convey the ultimate grief, this is the lowest moment any parent can have is the loss of their child and so, ‘we understand what you're doing as a writer and director, we're gonna give this to you.’ I just haven't seen that image before.
I think the through line with all my work is the idea of offering and providing dignity and grace and regality to persons who we sadly haven't seen given that level of beauty. And the question then becomes, can you, despite whatever moment in the character's arc they're in, no matter what has happened to them, can you still show them having a level of grace and dignity even if they're suffering, even if they're villainous? And I think that's what a lot of my work seeks to portray and the idea that every image, no matter what's happening should be first and foremost, visually stunning, because it's intended to be a seduction of the eye so that you look at an image long enough and you fall in love with the person. Personally, you think you wouldn’t care about but by looking at this image you're like, ‘Oh, 16 years later, I care about this child, and this child is just like mine, and I wouldn't have thought that, but because the images are designed to be so gripping, that I've just looked for longer than I ordinarily would.’
Yeah, I think that's kind of almost as my intentional methodology of this very Trojan horse thing of like, we know how to make beautiful images because we know how to put them together. And then the question is, to what purpose? To what end? If the end is like, for me, it's cultural acceptance. It's getting people to understand a culture or a place that they would think they wouldn't care about. That's why we make beautiful images, as opposed to just making them for a vapid, empty reason, because, you know, we can all make images now. And so, the question then becomes intention from the image becomes very important.
Sadie: Yes, and then the message behind it. It’s filmmaking 101, especially for newer screenwriters. You can say a lot more with a lot less on the page.
Walé: Yeah.
Sadie: With this film, I truly hope 10 years from now, people are studying this in film schools for that very reason.
Walé: Oh wow.
Sadie: Proving this is what you can do with an image and a story and it can resonate emotionally. So, I'm just putting it out there. We'll see.
Walé: True, we'll see! [laughs] That would be nice. If nothing else, you're being super generous, I think to the point that for me anyway, I'm very cognizant of the time people hear me say this often, in the grand scheme we're all here for such a short time, so the question is, particularly now in this era, when content is so hyper, it's very democratized, which is great, anybody can make a movie now, anybody can make anything, but there's so much of it, that it's almost if you're not saying something, I firmly believe that you're wasting your time and my time, everybody's time.
There's such a glut of material. If you're not trying to outlive yourself with the work and I don't mean in an egotistical sense, I mean, in the intention to make something that is meaningful to the culture, to your community, however you want to define it. I happen to have a daughter, making something that would make her world easier than mine - one doesn't want to foist your goals on other people - but for me, that is the intention of the work. Francis Ford Coppola is going to be gone but his daughter is going to have The Godfather. We're trying to make something that is so beautiful that people hope to hold on to it when you're not here. And that I think leaves us all in a better place, because when you watch a film, we watch Bravo, basically that is Walé's soul on a screen, and for better or worse. When however anyone feels about it is a film that comes from a very, I think very pure place of all the filmmakers, everybody involved in making it, it was made with so much love and care that it's a very honest letter. Whether or not it's received is a different story, but it is the honest offering from a group of people. And I think having made that as the first film, it's gonna be very difficult to not try to do that every time, just because it's just such an outpouring of, you know, hearing reactions like yours, it's just like, ‘Oh, it landed for somebody!’ [laughs] And it only takes one.
Sadie: [laughs]. Right, that’s all you could hope for with your work. And especially when you put so much of yourself into something like this and just even knowing that you had six people on your crew, I think it makes it even more special. Back to the imagery, I can’t help but keep thinking about the forward and rewinding of time element with the little boy running his kite – honestly, we could dissect your film all day.
Walé: Yeah, the idea was essentially a fable - we hope that you could play this for a child basically. And even though it has all the ridiculous complexity of like, well now it's in the future and now it's in the past, there's these things going on. There is an element of it's a very child story. Like, here's a boy who was in a town, he got scared and he ran away from home, and he came home. You want to have a very almost like a biblical element to where it's a very childlike story.
And then the hope is that you have that top layer. And then there are nuances that you and I would appreciate when the love story isn't very realistic, like,’ well, it didn't pan out for us.’ [laughs] As in most stories, you don't learn that when you're growing. Actually, it's rarely the happy storybook ending, usually, it's more about really finding happiness with yourself. In this case, the character literally ends up revisiting the happiest moment in life - seeing his childhood self like that. That is actually the way for most of us to find happiness is to look at ourselves and say, like, ‘Where am I within? Where's happiness within for me?’ That's the thing that a kid wouldn't catch, but the child would watch and see the kite flying scene, see the cool masks - so trying to design something that works for a variety of palettes is an interesting challenge.
Sadie: There's that line in your movie where one of the characters says, "The world will teach them suffering," about the children. And that's exactly that. It's just like, yes, they'll figure it out, like the love story, that's just life. [laughs] Your dad passes away. That's life.
Walé: That's the way it is. And I think with that line, it's almost the idea of like at a certain extent because the world is so cruel, it's not my job to li foist more cruelty upon it. [laughs] But let me just tell you, the rest sadly, no matter how much I love you, I can't protect you from the world.
Sadie: Let’s take a step back, I’d love to hear about how you found the intersection between being a designer and becoming a filmmaker.
Walé: I'll work backward - I think it makes sense when you look at it and realize it's all storytelling. And so, for me, it's basically about what's the most effective way - the form is actually not important - what's the most effective way to communicate your story? If you're telling a story, first you have to have a point of view, a message you're seeking to get across and then you think about, ‘Well I'm trying to say X, what's the best way for me to say it?’ So with clothing and for film, I found it to be fantastic, because I we get to do a costume and do a wardrobe design, which ends up in the film, we're still doing the fashion side. It hasn't gone away. It's just now it's on screen.
I got to the film, because I became a designer and initially you had to make campaigns as a fashion designer occasionally. And so, we became adept at making images and I've always been very mission and purpose focused. It just kind of slow-walked from making a couple of photos to a couple of campaigns, to now we're gonna go make a short documentary in Italy, which was the first film and having made that because of this documentary, what would happen if I just wrote something? You write that and now so it's what everybody says what film is - once you make a film, you can't not make films anymore [laughs] because you realize, ‘Oh, I'm stuck here now.’ Because it's thus far, to my experience, the greatest of all the art forms, it's also of course, the most expensive, [laughs] most capital intensive, it requires the most amount of people. It is very difficult and requires all types of resources, but it is the Venn diagram of everything, which is really great.
I think having to write and direct, I think it just comes from having just a very specific intention - I use that word a lot - and mission. And it's not that there's a lack of trust. Of course, you're required to trust, to have more collaborators, but I think when you have a very specific point of view, you want to be very clear about what you're trying to get across, because other points of view means rightfully, the message will shift, not for better or worse, it just will. So, I think when you're very precise about what it is you're hoping to accomplish, then you kind of need to funnel it through as few voices as possible so you can say exactly what it is that you're trying to say. I very much love and need the help of all my collaborators, but it's also there's a certain degree of like the buck stops here from the messaging standpoint, because the message is so important.
Sadie: And sometimes it’s hard to get to that place. Talking from experience, having pushed aside your own imposter syndrome, and questioning, ‘Does my voice matter? Do I need to get validation?’ Sticking to your original vision and message and following through is hard.
Walé: It's an interesting thing now, I'm standing in the position of now I'm a Sundance validated filmmaker, which is an amazing thing. But like, you know, two, three months ago, I was not and so it's interesting. And I say that to say I'm still the same person. I'm still wrestling with that is a fascinating thing. But it's also a reminder that you just have to, I guess speaking to, quote-unquote, younger filmmakers, make the thing that you want to make, and you can make that today, it doesn't have to be a multibillion-dollar situation. You really can make the thing and the more you make it the more certain the more dialogue that you have with yourself, the more you understand who you are, and we talk about finding your voice. Everybody has one and everybody's voice is crucial because we need all perspectives.
The more that we just kind of exercise whatever it is, that is in you, it's there. And it's waiting for you to kind of carve it from the marble so to speak. So, I think when we think about outside validation, I'm now a filmmaker, because I chose to make my first documentary. And then I chose to make this film, which was not quite intended to be a feature, but it became a feature and now I'm in a position to make my next feature. Nobody was knocking on my door to hire Walé to come make a film... I mean, maybe now they are, but it wasn't the case. I say that not because I'm great, but just because it's the thing that anybody can do. It's not simple, it's not easy, but it is a thing, it just requires a series of deliberate choices on one's part.
Bravo, Burkina!, was an official selection of the NEXT section at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
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Sadie Dean is the Editor of Script Magazine and writes the screenwriting column, Take Two, for Writer’s Digest print magazine. She is also the co-host of the Reckless Creatives podcast. Sadie is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, and received her Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute. She has been serving the screenwriting community for nearly a decade by providing resources, contests, consulting, events, and education for writers across the globe. Sadie is an accomplished writer herself, in which she has been optioned, written on spec, and has had her work produced. Additionally, she was a 2nd rounder in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and has been nominated for The Humanitas Prize for a TV spec with her writing partner. Sadie has also served as a Script Supervisor on projects for WB, TBS and AwesomenessTV, as well as many independent productions. She has also produced music videos, short films and a feature documentary. Sadie is also a proud member of Women in Film.
Follow Sadie and her musings on Twitter @SadieKDean
