Adura Onashile is a writer, actor, and filmmaker based in Glasgow. She played the title role of Medea as part of the Edinburg International Festival in 2022. Her play Expensive Shit debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and was adapted into a short film of the same name in 2020. Her first feature Girl, a drama about Grace (Déborah Lukumuena) a young African mother and her daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) coming to terms with a new life in Glasgow is in contention for World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance Film Festival. It’s also recently been revealed as the Opening Gala film at Glasgow Film Festival 2023. Ahead of its premiere at Sundance, we spoke to Adura about Girl, the casting and writing process, and her hopes for the film.
“Girl is a meditation on the relationship between a young mother and her child,” says Onashile, “And what happens when trauma is suppressed and has to be faced in order to thrive and not just survive.”
Meditative is one way to describe this delicate and enigmatic film, and the title is part of the ambiguity. “[The film] is a lot of different things, but I feel like it’s a coming-of-age story for both the mother and the daughter,” acknowledges Adura. “It was important to me that we sort of held that in the audience’s mind that it was something about arrested development.”
This arrested development is caused by a trauma Grace suffered that has essentially robbed her off her childhood. The central tension of the film is that she’s so paralysed by her past that her protective instincts towards her daughter threaten to stifle Ama.
“The film was really the emancipation of Grace in a way or the beginning of the emancipation of Grace, if that’s the right word,” says Onashile, “What I think come through is that because she’s been so traumatised, she’s in danger of stopping Ama from growing into her childhood. It’s almost like Grace doesn’t understand the parameters of what adolescence could hold, because hers was interrupted. And Ama is just being a normal little girl who is attached to her mother and then starts being curious about the world as she grows older. Grace doesn’t know how to deal with that and Ama takes her mother’s hand in a roundabout way to show her what she needs to do in order to deal with it.”
Girl is sparse in dialogue and asks its two leads to provide much of the film’s context. “I have to thank my casting director Isabella Odoffin,” says Onashile when asked about the casting of French actress Déborah Lukumuena and Le’Shantey Bonsu. “She asked if I was open to seeing actresses outside of the UK scene as this was a character that had been written as an immigrant. Essentially, she could come from anywhere in the African diaspora, and and so that was like a stroke of luck. So as well as seeing actresses in the UK, we saw actresses from Africa, and we saw African actresses from Europe as well. There’s a really mixed bag and honestly, the first time I saw Déborah’s tape, I was absolutely blown away.”
A different approach was needed for casting the 11-year-old Ama, and Onashile is effusive in her praise of her young star. “We went through schools mainly and Isabella started with schools in Scotland and then moved on nationwide and that was a bit more tricky because it was with a young person who hasn’t acted before. Things like accent, they haven’t had access to that work because they’re a child essentially, what you see is what you get. However we asked beautiful, beautiful Le’Shantey to do accent work. Because she’s from Leeds we really had to that and she was such a trooper. She had excellent classes and she’s of Ghanaian heritage, so she did have some access to tapping into that. For an 11-year-old to do that work was amazing to me, especially for one that hasn’t had much experience.
“So once we found [Déborah and Le’Shantey], obviously there were chemistry castings. Once we knew we had Déborah, we shortlisted maybe three other younger actors, and then it was about their interaction with Déborah . I’m from a theatre background, so this made total sense to me. I also had a rehearsal period before the shoot started, over three weeks. We met for half days with Déborah and Le’Shantey just to create a rapport and a complicity and to create a dynamic that makes us believe that these two have been wrapped up in each other for the entirety of Ama’s life.”
The writing and editing process was similarly exhaustive, with the story gradually honed down to focus the narrative firmly in the present, rather than on Grace and Ama’s past trauma. “Everybody says the editing process is a rewrite. For us it was quite phenomenal because it was a combination of what we shot and how we were feeling in the editing room.”
For Adura, how Grace and Ama were individually presented became intrinsic to the understanding of the other, and the edit became a fundamental part of establishing character. “I know in order to understand Grace we had to look at what happens to Ama in a much more episodic way. So there were some aspects that were written the way [the viewer sees] them, but there’s a couple of set-pieces that are intercut and that were discovered in the edit and that felt very exciting to me. And to be honest, I’m not into dialogue.”
This is a surprising admission from someone with an extensive theatre background, which Onashile acknowledges but is quick to contrast theatrical storytelling with the cinematic. “I just love silence, and I love quiet, and I love watching the world play across a character’s eyes and the audience being forced to go, ‘What is going on?’ I love that and so we really pushed into that in the edit.”
This also means a lack of exposition, which heightens the ambiguity surrounding Grace and Ama’s circumstances; an absolutely deliberate move. “It was not in the film because [normally in stories like these] so much time is spent justifying their existence, asking, ‘Why are you here? How are you here? What are the machinations of immigration [that led you] here?’ And that becomes the person’s story, and I knew that that wasn’t what this was about.”
Their past informs the story, but Girl focuses on a hopeful future and the process of healing, and Onashile was willing to trust the audience to go with the film’s elliptical mode of storytelling. “If you focus on the past and on the machinations of how they get her, it becomes all about the pain,” she says. “But actually, this is literally a coming of age film. It is about the moment where the world starts to change for you and you in the world start to change.
“I hope it doesn’t alienate audiences because I’m asking them to think about these characters in a different way, and I hope it doesn’t alienate audiences that they can’t figure out how long [Grace and Ama] have been here or where they’ve come from, or what exactly has happened to them.”
Another big component of the film is Glasgow itself, in particular the friendly working class community in which Grace and Ama find themselves. This seems like part of the reason (besides the film’s undoubted quality) Girl has recently been chosen as the Gala Opening Film for Glasgow Film Festival. Adura is both delighted and slightly baffled: “Am I being naive?” she laughs. “I just feel like it’s literally the stuff of dreams. And I have been reimagining myself into the role of the programmers going: ‘Is this a bit depressing to open up [the festival]?’ Just because it’s quite an emotional film. I mean, of course, it’s redemptive at the end, but I just think it’s really brave of them, and I’m really honoured that they want to open a festival with it. Maybe I’m being too self-deprecating, but I do feel like this is what I love about this city and this is why it’s my home and this is why I’ve lived here for 12 years.”
You may assume given her acting pedigree that Adura would have been tempted to step in front of the camera herself. Highlighting once again the difference between stage and screen, she says that was never even a consideration. “My acting background is mostly suited to theatre. I did tiny bits of TV lately, and it just doesn’t come naturally to me. I love the theatre and I love the immediacy of an audience. But also, I want to be on the outside. When I’m directing film and writing though I want to see into it, I don’t want to be in it. I want to be out here and taking in the frame and working with actors.”
While it’s a wonderful achievement to be featured prominently at two prestigious film festivals, Onashile inevitably reflects on her future hopes for Girl beyond March. “I think this is this is always the hope when you make an indie film that it will get a festival premiere,” she says. “And it will then get some sort of distribution. So that’s what we’re hoping for.”
One suspects those ambitions are more than achievable, but Adura ends on what is clearly a characteristically modest note. “Oh, my God, I would love it to do a run at the [Glasgow Film Theatre]. I would love it to be seen, you know, but it’s an arthouse film. And so the expectation is never that your film is going to make money but but it’d be so great if, if it was taken and if it had a cinema run.”
Girl premieres as part of Sundance Film Festival 2023 on Mon 23 Jan 2023 and as the Opening Gala of Glasgow Film Festival Wed 1 Mar 2023
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