Director Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor makes her feature debut with Dreamers. The story revolves around Isio (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), a Nigerian immigrant who is detained after she’s caught working illegally in the UK. Striking up a friendship with fellow detainee Farah (Ann Akinjirin), which grows into something more, Isio is forced to make a choice between complying with the rules, even as her asylum pleas are rejected, and escaping in pursuit of freedom.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has previously directed the 2016 web drama series Boxx, which she co-wrote with Yrsa Daley-Ward, about two black diasporan trans artists documenting their lives, and the 2021 short film For Love.

Dreamers is out in cinemas on Friday, November 5th.

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Paul Risker – How would you describe your relationship to cinema?

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor – I love cinema and when we had “Orange Wednesdays”, I’d go with a friend. Did I skip school? Maybe I skipped a little bit of school. I was there for at least three films every Wednesday. So, that’s my relationship to cinema.

Then, I studied film and I learned about everything from the French New Wave to Hollywood and Francophone cinema. For me, it was like my mind suddenly opened and I realised there’s more than the stuff I see on Orange Wednesdays. And I think that’s what began my journey into wanting to make films.

PR – Was there a particular film that sparked your motivation to make films?

JGA – It was probably In The Mood for Love [Wong Kar-wai, 2000]. When I saw that I thought, “Oh, my goodness, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life“. But equally, there was the French film called Shoot the Pianist [François Truffaut, 1960], which was a genre twisting sort of film. When I’m watching something, I love to feel that it can become something else. So, those are the two films that defined the kind of films I wanted to make and the kind of films I wanted to watch.

PR – What do you see of In the Mood for Love and Shoot the Pianist in Dreamers?

JGA – What I love about In the Mood for Love was the way he used colour. And it’s a love story – an unromantic romance when you think about it in the sense that it’s two people who realise their partners are having an affair, and they’re mimicking the affair to an extent. But it’s so romantic and there’s something about the way Wong Kar-wai uses space. I know he had a set, but still, it was the idea of these small spaces and how he used them.

For Shoot the Pianist, it was more that I like the genre twist because I love genre. I’m also very interested in politics and social issues. But I want to be able to do that through genre, and so whenever I watch Shoot the Pianist, I always ask what is it about? But I also enjoy its lightness because it’s like a murder mystery. It’s also a little funny because in the beginning you’re wondering, “he didn’t kill the woman did he? Maybe he did.’ But there’s comedy that happens in all of that”.

Films that pull you in one way and then lead you another interest me. I attempted to do a slightly similar thing with the love story in Dreamers that turns into an escape movie. I was trying to switch genre, but still have elements of the love story until the very end.

PR – Speaking about pulling the audience into the film, you force us to look at and recognise Isio’s experience from the beginning. It struck me as being a deliberate choice that might be politically motivated.

JGA – I did that a couple of times. I did it for the opening and I also wanted to do it for when she tells her story, because a lot of the time we never hear people’s stories. Instead it’s a collective, here they are. In the scene when she’s telling her story, I wanted the camera to slowly move because I wanted you to listen and to hear what she’s saying. I wanted you to really pay attention as if you’re in the room with her, as if you’re the judge. And if you were the judge, would you be thinking, ‘No, you’re not allowed to stay. I’ve actually thought about it, and I feel you’re here for my job.’ I wanted the audience to be in that position as well.

In the opening, it’s also that thing of coming into a place that’s not welcoming and you don’t know anyone. And the person who’s taking you around isn’t trying to be like, “How are you? You okay? Come this way”. She’s just reeling off what she always does because there’s lots of people coming every day, and those are her lines.

The media treats it as if they’re coming into luxury, but they’re not. You’re afraid because there’s a lot happening and you don’t know where you are. I wanted people to feel that discomfort of who is this person, and why is it so noisy? And to understand that this place is a prison ultimately, and that’s the way the system treats it. So, we couldn’t treat it as anything more than that. But because we have these asylum hotels, and then people think they’re living in luxury, even that’s not the case. Anywhere that has forced confinement is a prison, and this was one of the things I was trying to achieve.

PR – In its exploration of how immigrants are dehumanised, the film challenges the progressiveness of western culture and pulls at the threads of our colonial history.

JGA – I wanted it to be like, this is a woman who has found herself in here. She falls in love and she finds community. And yet each time she tells her story, the system consistently says, “No, you’re not gay”. What more can you do? And that happens all the time.

We don’t talk about that aspect of things because everyone is so focused on, “well, you gotta stop them at the border”, but we don’t talk about why these countries have laws where it says it’s illegal to be gay. Where do those laws even came from? A lot of it is colonial history. In the West, you’ve moved “forward” and you’ll say, “yes, it’s legal now in our country”, but in the countries where you had colonised and where you’ve left the history of Christian rhetoric, where you’re not allowed to be certain things, it still exists. When people from those countries come over, the response is almost like, “go back to your country!”. But we forget we’re the reason that they have those laws in the first place. I wanted to make people think about that. I wanted to create a space in which those conversations can happen beyond the film.

PR – Could we say Dreamers sits within a bigger conversation, in which change comes through a combined effort to engage and challenge ideas?

JGA – Exactly that, and when we showed the film at a festival in France, a guy who was genuinely interested came up to me afterwards. He wanted to understand the reasons behind why a lot of immigrants go to the US or the UK. We had a good conversation about whether that’s because of politics, colonisation or capitalism.

Some of these countries, their currencies are only compared to the pound or the dollar. So, they only see things in relation to, “well, if I go there, I can make £200 a week in comparison”. It was a good conversation and for him, he’s going to go off and think a bit more. And that’s the little bit of change I’m after, because it means that when he’s having other conversations with people, he can incorporate that into those conversations. Over time, like you say, a little bit of change here and there goes a long way.

PR – Cinema has a unique ability to offer a window onto other people’s lives, and sometimes people you would normally not care about. If cinema is indeed an “empathy machine”, does it bestow upon the medium a greater responsibility to promote change through compassion?

JGA – For art as a whole, it’s our job to challenge and to mirror society. I feel if we’re not challenging, then we’re not doing a good enough job in the grand scheme of things. For me, the films that I want to make, the challenge hasn’t always had to be that we’ve got to change the world now. The challenge is more like when you leave the cinema space, you think about why you felt a certain way. You ask why did I feel that way and what decisions, what choices am I making? I want people to think about the choices they’re making in relation to immigration, in terms of the governments and policies they vote for, because one of the things we forget is that we have choice and we are able to change things – it’s within our power.

And I think that’s something Isio learns, that at the end of the day, she can escape. It may be the wrong choice, but it’s the only choice that she has to get to the person that she loves. It’s the choice she makes because she realises, ‘Oh, wait, it’s mine to own, let me do that.’ In the end, I want people to realise, they have a choice, and if something affected you and if it stayed with you, then go make a choice that changes things a little. That’s what I’m hoping people will leave the film with.

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Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from Dreamers.