The Beautiful, Intimate World of Adura Onashile’s Girl

Girl

UK release: 24 November 2023

Directors: Adura Onashile

Starring: Déborah Lukumuena, Danny Sapani, Le'Shantey Bonsu

Interview by Sarah Edwards

Adura Onashile is the writer and director of Girl (2023). After an expansive career in theatre, Onashile transitioned into the film world with her 2020 short film, Expensive Shit.

Girl is Onashile’s first feature film, a daunting and exciting experience for the writer-director, and focuses on a story close to her heart. “I supposed when you are approaching something as big as your first feature,” she explains, “you want it to feel like something that is a burning passion.” 

For Onashile, that passion finds its roots in her upbringing in Bermondsey, London. Growing up as an only child in a single-parent household, Onashile took solace in her relationship with her mother. Marked by its deep intimacy and blurred lines between mother and friend, it was a connection she’d never seen explored on screen or stage before. 

Though the film is called Girl, Onashile thinks of it as Grace’s story just as much as it is Ama’s. “It’s the girl in Grace who is wounded, and acts from this very wounded place,” and who, Onashile says, “through the course of the film has to learn from a place where she feels more safe in the world.” 

Despite how central the role of trauma is to this story, Grace’s past is left obscured. Dreamy, hazy flashbacks hint at a story, but audiences are left to fill in the blanks for themselves. Explaining this approach, Onashile says, “I think that film has an obsession with violence against women’s bodies, and when we deal with what can be traumatic assault… we can be quite graphic. I’ve always wondered what that was for.”

Instead, Onashile prioritises how her characters react to the horrors of their past. “The real drama, for me, is what happens to people afterwards, and how they make sense of what happened to them.” 

Limited dialogue can be a challenge in a feature-length film, but Onashile uses all of the tools at her disposal to create a world that feels both intimate and epic. Grace and Ama’s life in Glasgow is vibrant and textural, with a cacophony of bold colours and soulful sounds. “It was always important that the poetry of their lives needed to come out in a different way,” Onashile says. 

She credits the work of production designer Soraya Gilanni in creating the dream-like sanctuary of Grace and Ama’s apartment. The score, composed by Re Olunuge, blends Greek and West African choral music to create a beautifully rich aural landscape guiding Grace and Ama on their journeys. 

“I’ve often been fascinated by how choruses work in Greek theatre, often speaking for characters or witnessing things or warning characters of things that are about to come,” Onashile explains. 

The influences of her work in theatre bleed through in other facets of Girl’s production, no more so than in her focus on process. The electric chemistry between on-screen mother and daughter Deborah Lukumuena and Le’Shantey Bonsu owes itself, at least in part, to the three-week rehearsal period Onashile organised before filming. “We had rehearsals where we played, we looked at the script, we sang songs, we danced, we made up stories, we improvised, you know,” Onashile says.  

Theatre could not prepare her for the challenge of letting her work go. Once a film is done, “you cannot tinker with it anymore.” Onashile says, “I can’t call the actors in for an afternoon rehearsal before the 50th show.” 

Since the beginning of 2023, Girl has run across the festival circuit, beginning with a stunning debut at Sundance, then travelling to LIFF, and finding its way to Onashile’s home city of Glasgow. For Onashile, the experience has been a constant learning process. “You’re on this constant journey of re-acquainting yourself with your film, through the eyes of new audiences,” she says. “Each time you’re sort of relearning the film.” 

“It’s been amazing. It’s been exposing as well,” Onashile says. It’s a mix of emotions only fitting for a film so centred on both the beauty and pain of life.