Fred Amata is a top player in Nollywood. He chatted with Glitz' Salome Johnson in this interview conducted at his office recently. In the interview, he speaks on Freedom in Chains, his new movie, He also advised the upcoming ones in the industry to work hard rather than sleeping around with sugar daddies and Godfathers to rise.'If you will become a superstar, no amount of sleeping around around with sugar daddies or Godfathers will make you a super star' he says.

How is life treating you?

Everything is fine to the glory of God.

What prompted the making of freedom in chains?

Freedom in chains is as a result of many years of giving and working in the entertainment industry. It came at the realization that we have given so much to Nollywood and entertainment. We have over the years been giving a lot to socially responsible films.

There is none of us in Nollywood Concept Promotions that have never at one time or the other done a serious project or a particular pressing issue. Roy Denario is the MD and he was almost the architect because he did the script and he was the assistant director of Mortal Inheritance.

He popularized the sickle cell through that film where Omotola Jalaade won the best actress of the year in 1997 and he won the best actor. I have done films about the addicts and the effects of hard drugs. I have also done a film with Jetta Amata on female genital mutilation and early marriage called Tears of a woman.

Keppy has done a film on gender based violence titled Baby Sitter which addressed the issue of violence against women. Bimbo has done a movie on widowhood known as Widow; the morning after where she actually shaved her hair for that kind of course.

So when this opportunity now came to deliver this same message on a platform that is wider and that could reach more of the audiences that we are talking about, it was something to grab and we grabbed it, took our take offs, we took huge take offs. We have been doing a lot of films for money, so we said; let's do one for the progress of the society focusing all these target issues and see if we can tie in Nollywood Concept Promotions with the vision of Millennium Development Goals (vision 2020) and that is where we are now.

In what format is the movie?
It is on video.

I thought it is on cinema?
It is not on cinema, it is on video. Only one cinema film has been shot in Nigeria since amazing grace. Nobody else has shot on cinema. Teco Benson shot a couple of films on HD and burnt to 35mm and it is not the same as shooting on cinema but those are great films. That also tells you about the power of Nollywood.

Is there any intention of mass producing freedom in Chains into home video in the future?
Freedom in chains has become a part of campaign against gender based violence and it is no longer a for profit movie. It is a not for profit movie, it is for a course to address certain causes which includes raising awareness on the topic, generating discuss on the topic and finally affecting legislature and then behavioral change.

What strategies have now been put in place to actually actualize these changes?
We are working together with the United Nations Fund Population Activity and we are marrying Freedom in Chains to some of their key messages and key targets and so it is actually their strategies that we are employing because these are the strategies that has been tested and proven the world over many times over.

So we are just a part of it and it is great. What we are doing now is that after we have done the film and we had our first screening in the UN house, the power of the film was so enormous and we decided that this film can not just go into a video cassette and set and go to television that this film now we should use where we go from place to place, show the film and provoke discussion and comments and hear the people talking about the issue and how it is affecting them today.

Today, everybody whether directly or indirectly has one is faced with gender based violence because even if you are not the direct recipient, you must know somebody somewhere who is being faced with one form of gender based violence or the other.

We need to hear these stories more and more and it in the hearing of the story that we can start to now formulate the kind of strategies that will address the issue because what we discover is that a lot of lip service can be paid to particular issue and nothing being done about it. But we discovered with the few screenings that we have had with Freedom in Chains is that it provokes people to want to talk about their situations.

As they are talking, we are actually in the process of being transformed into full fledge advocates for this course. Every where we go, we have talked to resource people, and most of the times they ask us… ah Bimbo Akintola, how did you do this in the film?… Fred Amata, how did you do this in the film?… and that now opens a vista for a whole new discussion and they talk. We have had screenings in Aso Rock, we have had in Abakaliki where we showed it to the students and the women community and we had responses… in fact, we just came back from Abakaliki last week.

So that is the strategy; we take the film to a particular community, local government, schools, church or social gathering; let them talk about it where there is an audience or group of people who no matter what have experienced it. In one of such screenings one girl actually came up and said I suffered this and she was bold enough to speak on; that is another issue with people, some do not want to speak about it. When you see them with wounds and you ask what happened to them, they will say 'no, I jam wall, my eye jam door' and how do you solve the problem when they are not speaking out.

So it is in seeing it and expressing it that it will now elicit the emotions for them to speak out. And we have recorded some measure of success that we can score major even in this early stages of the campaign.

What exactly are you going to do with these responses?
Don't forget that we are working with the UNFPA and it is their primary assignment and as we go they are using world processes and strategies that they have tested before and are trusted and they are developing the low down strategies that will address this issue because if you think that we have the answer here, you are very mistaken and it is a problem. We are working with people whose job is to understand the behaviors and trends legislature and reach every where. Continued    Source: Salome Johnson for nigeriafilms.com