Nigerian blogger and now filmmaker, Linda Ikeji is opening up about the reason why she chose to tell the ALUU Boys story as her first movie production. The movie about the story titled “Dark October” is currently streaming on Netflix, and since its release there have been a number of stories about it as some family members of the deceased boys seem to have some bad blood with Linda Ikeji for telling this particular story. There have been threats of lawsuits, Linda has responded to them telling them they’d be wasting their time if they take the matter to court, there has been all this back and forth. Because of this, a number of people have been wondering why this particular story, especially seeing how much chaos it’s now bringing outside of the movie.
During the movie premiere, Channels Television caught up with brain behind the movie Linda Ikeji, and now she’s opening up about why she decided to make a movie about this story, out of all the other stories. Here’s what she said.
**Before reading on, please make sure to like and follow my Facebook page (Jide Okonjo) so you don’t miss out on any new and interesting lists, articles, and stories that I post every single day. I have a really fun page. If you like my page, you will have fun too. So what’s stopping you? Like my page and let’s have fun together!
Speaking about why she chose to tell this story, out of all the other stories she could tell, Linda Ikeji said:
LINDA IKEJI: This story happened obviously in 2012 and my blog broke it when it happened because I had a cousin who was a student in the school who called me and told me what was going on. I couldn’t believe it. Until I saw the videos that came out of the scene, I couldn’t believe it. These were young, vibrant, hard working, talented young boys whose lives were snuffed out of them for no reason. And they were begging for their lives and these men were heartless, they didn’t care. They were being killed like animals. And these boys had ambition. They had dreams, they had aspirations. They were rappers, they were students, one was studying architecture. So I just thought that these boys must be immortalized. And I followed the story for five years: from when it happened to when they got justice in 2017, and a lot of Nigerians don’t even know that they got justice. Some of the men that killed them were sentenced to death, and some were sentenced to life imprisonment. We, those of us who have been extremely observant and following the case, we are still waiting for that verdict to be carried out because it hasn’t been carried out yet. So it was very important for me to tell the story, to immortalize the boys. To let the world know that these boys lived, even though their lives were snuffed out in the most brutal manner. In the most brutal manner, like sometimes I can’t even believe that human beings can be that inhumane, behave like animals – even animals have a bit of sympathy. And so when I wanted to go into telling stories, theirs was the first one I wanted to tell so that hundred years from now, when you and I are gone, people will still remember that they existed.
