If you are of the opinion that television has exhausted its power to shock, think again. Next Monday Channel 4 will show a drama set to truly stun audiences. Part of the channel’s Slavery season, I Am Slave is the story set in the present day of a young Sudanese woman, Malia, snatched from her village in the Nuba mountains and sold into domestic servitude, first in Khartoum, then in London. While the cruel treatment of 12-year-old Malia by her female master in Khartoum is deeply unsettling, what will make viewers’ jaws drop is seeing 18-year-old Malia’s enslavement against the backdrop of a gloomy British winter in a red brick London home, “so terribly familiar and rather boringly suburban,” says the film’s writer Jeremy Brock. Brock, whose screenplays include The Last King of Scotland, Charlotte Gray and Mrs Brown, had been similarly astounded to discover that slavery could still exist so close to home. “I thought of slavery as historical, or as a problem in another country,” he tells me. “But this is happening now, happening here.” Although the numbers forced to work in this way – paid nothing or next-to-nothing, passports confiscated, forbidden to leave the house without their master – are difficult to ascertain as the practice takes place behind closed doors, the Home Office estimates that up to 5,000 people are currently working as slaves in this country. The project was born back in 2003, when Brock’s then agent urged him to meet Mende Nazer, a Nuban woman who had been abducted, enslaved in Khartoum and later brought to work in a house in London from which she managed to escape in 2000. She had written a book about her experiences with journalist Damien Lewis. Nazer’s story – and “her dignity, the way she carried herself given what she had been through” says Brock – compelled him to take the idea to producer Andrea Calderwood with whom he had worked on The Last King of Scotland and she agreed to help him make the film. Somewhat predictably given its difficult subject matter, bringing I Am Slave to the screen has proved a drawn-out process. One major hurdle, recalls Brock, was raising money for a film peopled by African characters (the film is getting its premiere on Channel 4 but will travel as a feature film to festivals). “American financiers are very blunt with you,” recalls Brock. “They would say, ‘We’ve crunched the numbers on this, and it just doesn’t play.’” Then Brock had to make sure viewers would connect with the story. He strove to make Malia’s family life in Sudan before her abduction, and her father’s restless search for her thereafter, as easy to relate to as possible. “The risk is that an audience goes, ‘It’s Africa, it’s mud huts, what has it got to do with me?’ The challenge was to ensure that people didn’t have that excuse.” Like the film’s stark title, Brock’s screenplay is strikingly uncluttered, the dialogue pared down – he felt that to put too much into words would make the film seem too worthy, too didactic. But this sparsely scripted, atmospherically shot drama would fall down were it not for the portrayal of Malia by 24-year-old Rada graduate Wunmi Mosaku in her first film lead. As Malia, the Nigerian-born, Manchester-raised Mosaku is heart-rendingly real: at times she appears irreversibly reduced by the grinding fear of her situation, at others we glimpse flashes of a spirited Malia, the cherished daughter of champion wrestler. “I was so nervous and anxious about overacting, doing too much with my face,” she says. But Brock was awed by the extent to which Mosaku inhabited Malia. “You don’t feel it’s a performance,” he says. “I’ve had that with Judi Dench, Forest Whitaker,a few others, and it’s rare.” Talking to Mosaku, there is no question of her depth of feeling about her character. “This part comes with guilt as well. It’s doing wonderful things for me personally – I’m getting praise, getting to go to the Toronto Film Festival – but Mende [Nazer] and people like her have had to live through it, for me to have this opportunity.” Mosaku met Nazer at a screening of the film in July: “She was so brave to be there, so open, sobbing and crying. After, she said that everything ‘down to the movement of your eyebrows, Wunmi’ was true to the life she lived before she escaped. That was the biggest compliment, and I thanked God that the story that matters has been told.” I Am Slave is on Monday 30 August on Channel 4 at 8.30pm‘Slavery’s not in the past,
it’s happening here and now’
I Am Slave, a new drama from Channel 4,
highlights a shocking problem:
slavery in modern Britain. Naomi West reports.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
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