Ghanaian movie director and writer, Juliet Asante, has been speaking about the inspiration behind the movie, Silver Rain, the similarities between the Nigerian and Ghanaian film industry, the challenges facing the African movie industry and why she is into directing.
Set in the slums of Africa, Silver Rain is a story of love, pain and the strength of the human spirit.
Ajoa, a ‘Kayayo’ street girl from Accra, meets Bruce, the rich heir of the Timothy fortunes. Their friendship sets into motion a class war, as Ajoa struggles to cross the class divide and find love, Bruce struggles to find himself. Together, they must brave the turbulent political times, as well as the social barriers, that may just be their undoing.
In this interview, Juliet Asante, the writer and director, speaks about the inspiration behind the movie, the similarities between the Nigerian and Ghanaian film industry, and the challenges facing the African movie industry.
What’s inspired the movie Silver Rain?
Silver Rain is an aspirational story; it’s about moving up the ladder, it is a social story, it is a class-war story, about an ambitious market girl who decides that she wants to find love outside of her class and she starts a class war. It is based on a real meeting. I met a market girl in Ghana; one of those girls who help you carry your goods in the market – which is ubiquitous in African cities… I met one of them and she is a northerner; like what you’d call Hausa in Nigeria – (see, we are one people and we share so many similarities) – and her dad had over 40 kids and many wives. When I met her, she was 17 and her parents hadn’t seen her for 7 years; she had run away from home when she was 10, so I was the first person to take her home after all that time. When I met her family, they were shocked because they all thought she was dead. Back in Accra, they sleep on the street, in the market they lay under horrible conditions but when they get up, they smile and you can never tell even if they haven’t eaten. That was very inspiring coming from the other side of town… and that basically is the story of an average African; we live under very bad conditions but we wake up happy each day and I say Africans are magicians. That’s the inspiration behind the film; the strength of the people.
Why the title Silver Rain?
The name came to me; I was writing a scene in the movie in which the main character is reduced to the lowest denominator and out of her lowest point that is where she finds strength and rose up again. You find that life is like that; sometimes you have to be taken to the very bottom to come up and that is where in the tagline, there’s something that says “when there’s no place left to go but up” and there’s an African proverb that says “a goat that has a knife to his throat fears nothing”. At the point where you are at your lowest, that’s where you can find strength and rise above because you have seen it all and rain for me kind of captures that. This is because rain can mean a lot of things; rain can mean destruction, newness and a whole lot of things. In a nutshell, it captures the point where you are very low and out of that rain comes growth. That is how I got the title ‘rain’. About the ‘silver’, what is so obvious but isn’t so obvious… we all live in a society where someone who lives right across hasn’t eaten and you don’t know it or you are having problems where you are close to suicide and no one knows; everyone is going about their duty and thinking everything is fine. It’s a dual world we live in and there is so much going on and yet it is not so obvious because we all live in our individual worlds and that’s where silver came from because I asked a few people, what is the color of rain? And everyone had something different to say. Some said rain is crystal, some said blue or brown and others said clear like silver. That got me thinking about how what is so obvious, could be so hidden? Let me ask you… what is the colour of rain?
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