Stella Damasus Shines in Akwụna

Veteran Nollywood actress, Stella Damasus, has displayed her tremendous acting skills in a short film, Akwụna, as Ebere the protagonist.

While Akwụna was written and produced by Nnamdi Kanaga, it was directed and executively produced by Oluyinka Davids.

Wrapped in Dallas Texas a few days ago, Akwụna is a collaborative arrangement among Davids, Kanaga, and Stella Damasus who doubles as the associate producer.

The film co-stars Dallas-based American actor Tim Meadows, The African Film Festival Director Kelechi Eke, Kanaga, and Sara Rashelle.

For Damasus, she took on this role because of the challenge. After being in the industry for over 25 years, always playing the decent and respectable housewife or the damsel in distress, “I thought it was time to do something different and push myself beyond the boundaries and expectations that people have set for me”.

She describes the role as a new chapter in her life, expressing, “And with newness, comes the boldness and desire to take more risks and challenges in my career and life in general.”

Now Davids emphasised the importance of the movie when he mentioned that everybody wants to come to America, but the truth is not everybody really knows what goes down in America.

He said: “This might sound very cliche but it is a reality oftentimes (if not always) overlooked. Stories about survival in America can be very scary, I mean people do a lot of things in order to breathe the “American oxygen”, and in that process lose a lot of things sometimes even themselves.”

Kanaga chipped in on their choice to do something unique. “When Stella, Oluyinka, and I decided to do a project together, we wanted the collaboration to birth something different. Something people have never seen before.

“With this in mind, I wrote the script without thinking about any limitations because we were ready to give it everything- creatively, technically, artistically, and beyond. Akwụna is daring. The story threads on paths that people have, in recent times, avoided and/or overlooked.”

Although he admitted that Akwụna is a short film, they hope to get more resources to make the story into a formidable TV show.