Lagos, Nigeria (Minority Africa) — Pamela Adie is not new to the struggle of ensuring proper representation of queer people and social acceptance. Pending in the Nigerian court of appeal is a suit that challenges the Corporate Affairs Commission’s refusal to register Lesbian Equality and Empowerment Initiative (LEEI), an NGO she set up for lesbians in Nigeria. Today, Adie, 36, remains an LGBTQ+ rights activist and is the executive director of Equality Hub. She has worked on several groundbreaking projects in the past including her biographical documentary, Under The Rainbow which screened at the residence of the British Deputy High Commission in Lagos, Nigeria and has just recently produced a short film, Ìfẹ̀, that follows the story of two women who fall in love over a three-day date. “Representation in films is key in terms of accelerating social acceptance for the LGBT community,” Adie tells Minority Africa. “If you look at history, what you see is that when they portray us, we are portrayed as people to be ridiculed or people to sometimes be killed… the stories are usually negative, we rarely find positive stories.” Ìfẹ̀ is directed by Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim, 31, a Radio, Television, and Film Studies graduate of Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus. Ikpe-Etim was the best graduating student in her class and with Ìfẹ̀ as her directorial debut, she explains that she wants to challenge the ugly norms of homophobia that have become ingrained in Nollywood over time. “Stories can be used to paint a group of people however you want to paint them,” she says. “What I did in Ìfẹ̀ is to paint LGBT people in a different light, representing queer people as normal people who are here and live normal lives like everyone else.’’ Ìfẹ̀ would not be the first film to address queer representation in Nigeria. It is coming after Hell or High Water, a movie about a gay pastor who eventually accepts his sexuality amidst stiff opposition from the public, but Ìfẹ̀ would nonetheless be the first Nigerian film to center women who are lesbian or bisexual. “This story needs to be told also because as a lesbian or bisexual woman, you are doubly silenced, first as a woman and second as queer,” Adie says. “It is not an unusual story; it is just a story of an underrepresented and misrepresented subject in Nollywood,’’ Uzoamaka Aniunoh, one of the two-cast members, tells Minority Africa. Aniunoh holds a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and has appeared in the Pan-African TV series, MTV Shuga. She hopes Nigerians question the prevalent homophobic sentiments. “When people watch, I expect that they will question why they feel the things that they feel and why they are against something so beautiful and human,’’ Aniunoh says. Despite the seminal place Ìfẹ̀ will hold in Nollywood, its creators will not allow it to be termed a “queer’’ movie. Recognizing the power of language to redefine people’s experiences and confine to a tag, Ikpe-Etim opines, “Queer is not a genre.” The ultimate goal of the team behind Ìfẹ̀ is not to create a separate space for movies that portray queer people’s experience but to make the inclusion of queer people seamless and a part of the system. “When you watch a movie with heterosexual people, do you call it a heterosexual movie?” Aniunoh asks. “When you watch a movie, for example, and the characters do not engage in sex, do you say, ‘Oh, this is an asexual film?’’’ Yet for all its norm-breaking, Ìfẹ̀ would not be aired on Nigerian television. It would only be available on select channels provided by the Equality Hub. Its creators deem it a movie for those who need it and who want to watch themselves represented on-screen with accurate depictions that do not make queer people props. They describe it as not geared towards the consumerism of the Nigerian movie industry and instead as a work of passion put together by a group of people who are tired of being on the sidelines, and of leaving their identity and its interpretation in the hands of outsiders who do not fully understand them or are willfully bound to a pact of non-acceptance of their humanity. On this note, Aniunoh remarks, “From the beginning of time, we have watched heterosexual love on TV; this is reminiscent of when we didn’t see black people on TV. Now there are queer people around and we are here to show queer love.’’ The landscape of identities, however, remains narrow; and Ìfẹ̀, its creators know, will bolster queer representation in Nigeria at a cost.