By Ali Baylay

A Venus Film productions.Starring: Van Vicker, Jackie Appiah, Kofi Adjorlolo, Kalsoume Sinare, Rama Brew, Gavivina Tamakloe, Yvonne Nelson; Editor: Dapo Ola Daniels; Assistant Producer: Ali Samba; Producer: Abdul Salam Mumuni; Executive Producer: Abdul Salam Mumuni; Director: Frank Rajah Arase. 150 mins.

The princely cast of Gollywood’s finest really do an excellent performance here, to boot, and in fact this movie got me sold to Gollywood movies. As you can see, I’ve been all about Nollywood, but since  I discovered Tears of Womanhood, a Gollywood classic, I  believe  good movies do come from Ghana’s woods, such as Princess Tyra. With its fairy tale nature, this movie will take you to a fairyland where stories like Cindarella may seem a joke.

Princess Tyra is not our typical royalty versus peasant kind narrative; it is a kind of story about a royalty kicking against the mores of a palace,  in exchange for the common life. Your guess is good as mine where such kingdom exists in our part of Africa, but this prince sure looks like a future king of Morocco than the true negroid prince of lower Sudan.

I did not have the patience to sit through part 3 of this movie, ’cause I live in the first world and no one movie will put my life on hold for three hours straight. Princess Tyra  is a good movie though, one of its kind coming from Africa today. Imagine, two royal families promised each other a child in marriage so both kingdoms could cement relationships. It turns out  Prince Kay (Van Vicker) has turned liberal, scorning everything royale in exchange for common life. He doesn’t believe that in this “ 21st century people still indulge in those barbaric rites”, he queried at one point.  At the other end of this tangent,  is a saucy, spoilt brat, Princess Tyra (Yvonne Nelson), who can put on hold the hustle and bustle of a supermarket, just so she can buy an item or two.

Prince Kay is turned off by Princess Tyra’s stringent royal tradition and principles, who declares that, “the wishes of mortals the gods command.” And she has  frequent outbursts with not a dint of romance in it. He, runs from a princess, “who’ll not have my peace”, he laments. But for Princess Tyra, “Where thunder and lightning strikes birds don’t fly”, she boasts of destroying whoever stands between her and her desire for the prince, because, “vegeance of a woman is like a burning bush”.  

In the middle of it all is a common maid, Maafia (Jackie Appiah) who massages the prince’s feet in a rite once and later in a queer bathroom incident, falls under the romantic rader of the prince. We did not see the two (prince and maid) mate, but not long after the maid’s mother dies of asthma attack, Maafia leaves Ilugbo Kingdom in search of Prince Kay to report her pregnancy to him but instead meets the prince’s mother, the Queen, and reports her pregnancy. The Queen doesn’t handle this news well.

The story gets sticky when writer employs another plot  and character, Ashley to merely resemble Maafia and gets Ashley pregnant by the prince , and both by bizzare plot twist, meet side by side in a hospital. Camera and edit can pull all kinds of  tricks but this Maafia look alike coming into the story sure put a damper and unbelievable feeling to the story. I marvel the fact that writer created a three dimensional character for Jackie Appiah’s role (maid, Ashley, Maafia) , only that in narrating such a wonderful fairy tale, story and character have  to be linear in nature, or not even Cinderella could have survived as a timeless tale with such muddled plots. Prince Kay would have gone on pulling all the stops to get to his one and  only cinderalla, rather than easily fall for a look alike and gets her pregnant too.

By Ali Baylay

The Untold Truth explores a family situation we all have either witnessed or have been part of. I witnessed such situation growing up in my home town: A rich and powerful man in my quarter had an only girl in all girls dormitory, but she had the habit of stealing anything from her fellow girls: panties, shoes, dresses or anything she lays her hands on in seclusion, and she did this just for the heck of it. My neighbor’s girl continued this habit  and was eventually expelled from the all girls school and thus brought home shame to her parents. In a parallel circumstance as in The Untold Story, the rich man’s sister who couldn’t bear an issue of her own was blamed for the unfortunate situation.

Samuel Okafor’s production of The Untold Truth is a story of parental dilemma and shame. Chief Okenwa’s (Kofi Adjorlolo) son suddenly arrives in a cab from Canada with not a single luggage. Though this manner of arrival doesn’t sit well with either the mother, Lolo (Patience Ozokwo) or the sister, Nkiru (Mercy Johnson) the family swallow it all and sit down and wait until the thieving habits of Peter (Francis Duru) begins to surface.

From then on, Peter’s thieving habits becomes frequent and so the family continue to be embarrassed. He steals the jeans of a brother of a girl he wants to marry, steals the cellphone of his sister’s boyfriend, and shoplifts a store when he’s in the company of his sister. Meanwhile, the churches are been consulted and each gives their opinion and help to wade this curse, and yet, Peter’s thieving habit persists, to the utter embarrassment of all in the family even to the point of himself breaking up when he steals his sister’s boyfriend’s cellphone. By contrivance, the priest points the brother of the chief to be the perpetrator of the curse, as he showers him in the blessed pool.

The line up of actors and their acting make this story a memorable one. Kofi Adjorolo’s character in this heavy drama is one of a father who abandons his household affair in return for politics. Patience Ozokwo has never been so caring in a household as in this film. Mercy Johnson’s acting weaves  the fragile plots of the movie together to make it all the more memorable. Francis Duru’s character carries the burden of this film to the finish line and he does a good job at it.

If the essence of the story as was envisioned by the writer could be what I felt after watching this film, then he really got me. The movie left  me reeling with  pain, shame, sadness and despair for Francis Duru’s character. It evokes a paranoid state of mind of Peter, which shows in his disjointed deliveries, his uncertain gaze, and his sluggish gait. The film could be classified as a painful and depressing experience, that leaves one cold and tired,  especially for the parent sensing either his son or daughter caught  in such a low life behavior.

In considering the manner in which part two of the film ends, the writer didn’t do Peter justice by living him unchanged, and my soft heart follows such memorable character and acting eternally. Well, not every movie has to be  fun, or ends with, ‘happily ever after.’