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Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun a Motion Picture!


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Also, on Monday May 4th, we are interviewing Anika Noni Rose who stars in this film.  If you have any questions for her please post them in a reply below.

 

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In Theaters: May 16, 2014 (Limited Release)

R, 1 hr. 53 min., Drama, Directed By: Biyi Bandele, Written By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Staring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, John Boyega

About the Film
Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) are glamorous twins from a wealthy Nigerian family. Upon returning to a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria after their expensive English education, the two women make very different choices. Olanna shocks her family by going to live with her lover, the "revolutionary professor" Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his devoted houseboy Ugwu (John Boyega) in the dusty university town of Nsukka; Kainene turns out to be a fiercely successful businesswoman when she takes over the family interests, and surprises even herself when she falls in love with Richard (Joseph Mawle), an English writer. Preoccupied by their romantic entanglements, and a betrayal between the sisters, the events of their life seem to loom larger than politics. However, they become caught up in the events of the Nigerian civil war, in which the lgbo people fought an impassioned struggle to establish Biafra as an independent republic, ending in chilling violence which shocked the entire world.

 

 

About the Book

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A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as 'the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,' Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

 

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another. 

 

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race'and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.

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Funny, the first thing that came to my mind reading the above article was that with this supposedly being "The Year of the African", as exemplified by an African director and African actors starring in and winning Oscars for " 12 years a Slave",  honors that further include new "it" girl Nigerian Lupita Nyong'o''s being selected as PEOPLE magazine's "most beautiful" pick, who do we having playing 2 African chicks in a movie about  twins from wealthy Ibo families, but high-yellow, bi-racial Thandie Newton and light-skinned, African American actress Anika Noni Rose.  I'm sayin... 

 

Not surprising. Just amusing.  Guess this balances out Africans beating out directors and actors of black American descent when it comes to telling our slave stories.

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