If you are wondering who Faraday Okoro is, here’s a crash course: he is a NYU graduate student and became the inaugural winner of the Tribeca Film Festival’s AT&T Untold Stories program, a competition designed to champion diverse artistes who are underrepresented in mainstream cinema.
Given that he had only previously produced shorts, this triumph was a life-altering event for the 31-year-old New York-based Okoro, since the reward was $1 million to shoot his debut feature. The only catch? He had to have it ready to premiere twelve months later at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Temporarily relocating to shoot the film in Lagos, Foreign Prince is based on the unfortunate pedigree of Nigeria’s email scam industry. A year after securing the prize, Okoro has fulfilled his obligation with the movie, a saga about dislocation, alienation, and the means by which those in uncomfortable (and desperate) circumstances define their identity.
Nigerian Prince follows the story of Eze, a stubborn, first-generation Nigerian-American teenager and his cousin Pius, who is a desperate Nigerian Prince scammer. After Eze’s mother sends him to Nigeria against his will, Eze retaliates by teaming up with Pius to scam unsuspecting foreigners in order to earn money for a return ticket back to America.
Executive produced by Spike Lee and Sam Pollard, Nigerian Prince will hit US theaters October 19. Starring Antonio J Bell, Chinaza Uche, Bimbo Manuel, Dean Cameron, Tina Mba, Craig Stott and amongst others, the movie will be distributed across all AT&T video platforms, including DirecTV and DirectTV Now.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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