Aje & Bruja Builds on African Futures in Film

A look at the short film by groundbreaking filmmaker Nosa Igbinedion

American screenwriter and director Orson Welles said that a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

African mythology and religion naturally lend themselves to a colorful and expansive worldview that is highly translatable to the silver screen. One of the young filmmakers who are highlighting the possibilities for African-centered stories is Nosa Igbinedion.

The British-Nigerian filmmaker made the Rise of the Orisha film series that incorporated deities sewn into the cultural fabric of Nigeria, such as Oya (2014) and Yemoja (2016). The productions, which were viewed by millions of people across the globe, had an undoubtable impact on Marvel greenlighting The Black Panther movie franchise and the Amazon Prime release of a film like Nanny in 2022.

Now, Nosa is back with his latest film project Aje & Bruja (“Bruja” is the Spanish word for “witch”). He recently talked to the Indivisible College about his new production, Nollywood, and Artificial Intelligence among other things.

In your films I notice that you highlight the rich spiritual culture that is unique to Nigeria. How does your art intersect with your personal life?

Well, I think I would start by quoting something a deeply spiritual friend once told me. That you should ‘treat your life like a divination’. The idea of divination in Nigerian traditions revolve around stories (Odus) that are selected by  a diviner/Babalawo that mirror the life of the seeker and then the seeker has to discern how it applies to his life.

He must see how the patterns of our cyclical existence repeat in his own life. And in that vein, I try to read the patterns in my own life—patterns that may be recurring events, recurring dreams, or recurring behaviors. And as my art is a reflection of my life, I can’t help my art being a divination too. I hope it is. A divination in the sense that, like the archetypical magician who lives and works in the unknown, I am trying to uncover truths in my work. Hidden truths about society, deeper truths about myself.  

So how does art intersect with my personal life? I think it more than intersects. It is connected to my personal life like a Siamese twin. There is no separation. Whatever the medium, whatever the substrate, the only true means of creation is my being, my soul, my essence. Me. In the end, I guess, I try to make my life a work of art and my art a work of life.

The main characters of the film are a mother daughter duo of vigilantes against human trafficking. Are the characters influenced by the Iyami Aje?

Yes, the characters are influenced by the powerful mothers. The Iyami Aje are known as spiritual mothers, a maternal power passed down by mothers to daughters, a symbol of the appreciation that traditional Yoruba culture has for the innate magic of the feminine ability to conceive, birth, and nurture life.

Traditionally the Iyami Aje were a mystical order of protectors charged with restoring balance in a community (hence in my film the Aje are vigilantes against human trafficking). They are said to have the power to be great healers, but they also can be just as destructive as they are healing, if need be. But in the modern age, it has been that power for destruction that most Nigerians (influenced by monotheistic traditions) have seized upon.  

Hence many Nigerians simply see Aje as meaning a witch. A bogeywoman. So, while this essence is venerated in the ways that we will protect and love the embodiments of femininity from Grandmother to Goddaughter, many Grandmothers and Goddaughters have found themselves ostracized in many Nigerian communities or even worse killed. And this is all because they don’t fit into pre-conceived notions of being and hence they’ve been labeled “Aje” as a pejorative title.

In making this film I was interested in the clash between love and fear. How these women with Aje abilities could evoke adoration and terror in equal measure. And I remembered the prophetic dreams of some female relatives. The emotional depth and artistry of some of my exes. The strangeness of one of my best friends who is a prodigious artist, designer, architect and musician and was the costume designer on this film. And the ability to create and destroy for many women in my life. To me, they are all Aje—and not in the pejorative sense. And with these flesh and bone humans to draw upon, these examples of Aje in the everyday I could picture my characters—their complexity, quirkiness, the shades of grey that paint the picture of anything in this dualist universe.

Marvelous. In the Iyami Aje I see conceptual parallels with the Furies of ancient Greece who were influenced by North African women according to Greek records. When I initially became aware of Nollywood around 2004, there seemed to always be a pro-Christian sentiment that demonized the spiritual systems indigenous to West Africa. Is there a shift  away from that sentiment among Nigeria’s young people or is that sentiment still firmly in place?

There is a shift, it may be slight, but there are much more people willing to discuss, or share, traditional spiritual systems. This is partly due to the work of great people, who have used the internet to connect and share these systems. But it’s also Afrobeats musicians using not just spiritual iconography in their work, but bringing the indigenous spirituality transcoded in the form of music to global audiences.  Recently I myself have launched an art studio that’s dedicated to working with the ancient technique of Benin Bronzing to tell modern day stories.

With a population (in Nigeria) that’s 75 percent under 25, there is a tsunami of awakening coming. A new age of minds ready to question and interrogate dogma. And African spiritual systems with their fluidity, acceptance of the good and bad in everything and deep connection to the natural world that we all live in are more appealing to a mind that is seeking rather than retreating in fear.

The fact is that Nigeria is still recovering from a wave of Pentecostalism that swept the country during the fear-based times of the ’90s and of course the religions brought by Western and Arab colonization, all of whom demonized traditional West African spiritual systems. Both the ’90s, with its armed robbery sprees and ever oppressive military rule, and the age of colonialization were times of great fear.

In the vortex of fear the mind contracts in on itself and accepts what is most forcefully presented to it. And what was presented, with force, to Nigerians in those ages was Abrahamic religions. So as we move towards an age of less domination and open minded enquiry, I expect to see more West Africans and Black people all over the world to look to these indigenous spiritual systems for guidance.

Free people don’t want to be proselytized to, and you will rarely find traditionalists trying to recruit a ‘flock’. Free people realize that what’s true doesn’t have to be forced upon people. What’s true doesn’t need a holy war or armies fighting its cause. What’s true, just is…

Have you received any flack from Nigeria’s Ifa community for incorporating Orisha into film?

Well firstly I would say the Ifa community (the Yoruba traditional spiritual community) is not really a homogenous block. There is a lot of flexibility in Ifa, where for example different people can align with different Orisha, which accounts for the multiplicity of human experience. But then there are variations on how people practice say Olokun in Edo state versus in Osun state versus Togo. And while for Ifa there is a holy corpus in the holy Odus, the essence of the spirituality is found in nature and within the human themselves.

So, all this to say that I’ve actually received a lot of encouragement rather than flack, from adherents to Traditional African Spirituality, across the board. I think they are pleased to see these traditions represented with more balance than is typically found in Nollywood films. Many people have reached out to give advice or corrections, but generally, the sentiment has been encouragement to keep going and keep making more.

That’s very encouraging to hear, because I think the culture can galvanize the imagination of the youth, where they can envision greater possibilities for themselves.

With the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) strikes Hollywood’s use of AI was a major topic of contention for actors who could potentially have their likeness used in perpetuity, and screenwriters who could be replaced by machines. What are your thoughts on AI as it relates to the film industry?

When I go to sleep and dream and tap into the subconscious I realize there is an unlimited amount of creative intelligence stored away there. There’s a massive amount of data being processed, just like an A.I. but unlike an A.I. there’s also a single perspective. There’s an ‘experiencer’ there. And with subjective experience comes desires, motivation—purpose.

At the moment A.I seems to be able to process a lot of data and organize it in interesting ways (hence its language capabilities) but does it have an experiencer inside there? Does it have perspective? If it doesn’t, then it is intelligent, but it is not conscious. And all that’s happened is that we’ve decoupled intelligence from consciousness, decoupled it from subjective experiences.

And think about it, intelligence, in the knowledge worker driven information age, is the machine in the factory of the industrial age. Intelligence has become a tool. I think the question is how the tool will be used.

In the case of film and TV, there is the danger of formulaic film or TV work being cloned by A.I. like conveyor belt consumer goods. But that only works if you have an audience primed for formulaic work, which sadly is the case so far (think of your standard superhero formula). And therefore I think it’s important for writers to lean into the thing A.I. does not have—conscious subjective experiences, and use that to create stories that will hopefully shape audiences’ tastes. Communicate with that consciousness that we all share.

Currently, I think A.I. is a tool for screenwriters that could replace some of the rote jobs, but without a true perspective, without consciousness, I don’t think it can replace an actual writer just yet.

And when it does have a perspective, enough of a conscious experience to replace a human writer, then the problem it poses will be far beyond film, it will apply to all areas of human life.

The question of what a consciousness with more intelligence and processing power than all of humanity ever up to this point will do, is frightening. But I doubt A.I. will ever actually be conscious; however I do think that its massive processing power and intelligence will be leveraged by some humans more effectively than others and that could create a gap between writers and their career fortunes.

But there is also the other possibility that some writers and artists become dependent on A.I, which leaves the artists who have worked on their craft outside of this technology at an advantage.

Do you see AI as Western man’s attempt to create an intelligence network on par with the Orisha or other spiritual intelligences? Is there a supernatural aspect behind the global AI push in your view?

I never saw that angle (the attempt to create an intelligence network on par with Orisha etc…) but now you speak of it, it makes me think of a story I once wrote about a deity being downloaded in the form of code, i.e. as an A.I.

And this god was trapped in this A.I server and used to create amazing things by its captors. This makes me think about the general technological push. It almost feels like aliens have invaded our planet, but instead of coming in flying saucers they came in these handheld devices that have radically changed our behavior in a couple decades.

For me, this sense that the technology is using us, and not the other way around, is pervasive in thinking. Technological acceleration is outstripping human evolution and capability by orders of magnitude. This adds to my sense that no one human being is pushing this, or is at the helm of this, rather it’s being pushed on us. But who is doing the pushing, if it’s not a human?

While I don’t believe there is anyone driving at the wheel of this thing called earth, I think there are forces greater than us orchestrating our world and lives. The concept of human self-determination is a relatively new thought.

Previous civilizations attributed emotions and impetus and inspiration to other spiritual beings that humans were just the channel for. What if ideas are living things, beings that exist out there on another plane of existence and they are just waiting for the human channel to find expression. So, what if tech and A.I was just an idea that is looking for its expression via our civilization, through our collective humanity.

And like many ideas, there will be humans who try to harness it for their own self-aggrandizement, but ideas, like the French revolution which ended up killing the people who started it, have a way of outgrowing the people who channeled them.

Have you entered Aje and Bruja into any film festivals? If so, how has the response been. If not, do you plan to enter it in any festivals?

Yes it has. Great response so far. It’s been seen by a range of audiences who have all taken well to it, so that’s good. It’s played at Pan African Film Festival, Durban International Film Festival, The Fantastic Fest in Texas and a few others. I have been working on a feature film version that involves our two leads going on a road trip across Nigeria. It’s got a bit more of a satirical horror vibe than the short. Hopefully the success of the short can help me get the feature made quicker.

How can people see this new film?

It’s showing at a couple more festivals. I should be releasing it online early next year.